Mode Competition in Steady-State Optical Waveguide Amplifiers

摘要

A theory of monochromatic light propagation in a fiber amplifier is developed. It is shown that competition between coherent gain-guided modes is qualitatively different from interaction between incoherent beams. Spatial beating between modes limits the gain of the mode with lower input power even if the corre_sponding modal gain coefficient is higher. Depending on the input beam parameters, the amplifier output can be dominated by either a single guided mode or their combination. The theory is illustrated by analyzing the gain behavior of a single planar waveguide and arrays of two and three narrow planar waveguides.