On a Formulation for the Pulse Jitter Induced by Spontaneous-Emission Noise of Optical Amplifiers

Abstract

Up to now, research in optical amplifiers has been done mainly concerning noise and gain features¹. Much less attention has been paid to the pulse jitter, at the optical amplifier output, induced by spontaneous-emission noise. In², the average arrival time of the pulse at the amplifier output was used as time reference upon which the pulse jitter was defined. Here, this approach is used to evaluate the pulse jitter at the output of an optical fibre link due to the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of optical amplifiers. To achieve this purpose, the pulse power at the output of a system composed by an optical amplifier followed by the optical fibre is derived (section 2). In section 3, the pulse jitter is evaluated and an illustrative example is presented and discussed. Then, assuming statistical independence between the noise due to different optical amplifiers, the output pulse jitter of an optical fibre link (chain of optical amplifiers) is assessed and a comparison with the pulse jitter in soliton propagation is done (section 4). In section 5, conclusions are outlined.