Optimization of rare-earth-doped amplifiers for space mission through a hardening-by-system strategy
Résumé
Rare-earth doped optical fibers (REDF, Er or Er/Yb-doped) are a key component in optical laser sources (REDFS) and amplifiers (REDFA). The high performances of these fiber-based systems made them as promising solution part of gyroscopes, telecommunication systems… However, REDFs are very sensitive to space radiations, so their degradation limits their integration in long term space missions. To overcome this issue, several studies were carried out and some innovations at the component level were proposed by our group such as the Cerium co-doping or the hydrogen loading of the REDF. More recently we initiated an original coupled simulation/experiment approach to improve the REDFA performances under irradiation by acting at the system level and not only at the component itself. This procedure optimizes the amplifier properties (gain, noise figure) under irradiation through simulation. The optimization of the system is ensured using a PSO (Particle Swarm optimization) algorithm. Using some experimental inputs, such as the Radiation Induced Attenuation (RIA) measurements and the spectroscopic features of the fiber, we demonstrate its efficiency to reproduce the amplifier degradation when exposed to radiations in various experimental configurations. This was done by comparing the obtained simulation results to those of dedicated experiments performed on various REDFA architectures. Our results reveal a good agreement between simulations and experimental data (with <2% error). Finally, exploiting the validated codes, we optimized the REDFA design in order to get the best performances during the space mission and not on-ground only.