Cladding Pumped Randomly Coupled 12-Core Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier With Low Mode-Dependent Gain

We demonstrate a randomly coupled 12-core erbium-doped fiber (EDF) based cladding pumped optical amplifier. In this paper, we show that a randomly coupled multicore EDF amplifier with a cladding pumped configuration can realize high amplification efficiency and a low mode-dependent gain (MDG). We experimentally evaluate the amplification characteristics and confirm a flat gain of more than 17 dB with a sufficiently low MDG of less than 1 dB over the full C-band and an average noise figure of 6.2 dB. In addition, we describe a transmission experiment in which we inserted a randomly coupled 12-core multicore fiber (MCF), and demonstrate that the proposed 12-core MCF can transmit 12 channels.