Experimental investigation of the saturated regime of short pulse amplification in counter-pumped Raman amplifiers

With the development of high-speed optical telecommunications, also appeared optical amplifiers such as Ra-man amplifiers [1] , [2] . Allowing a distributed amplification and offering a wider gain bandwidth than other amplification techniques, there are preferably used in their counter-pumped regime (relative intensity noise transfer reduced). In the case of a pulsed signal to amplify, it is important to understand the transient effects of such an amplifier [3] . In this paper, the influence of short pulses width on transient and saturation effects of a counter-pumped Raman amplifier is thus experimentally reported.