Optical Pumping Technique

Abstract

A Raman amplifier having an optical pump configured to generate pump bands, each of which is spectrally aligned with a respective wavelength channel of a frequency grid in a manner that enables the pump bands to coexist in an optical fiber with data-carrying signals of other wavelength channels of the frequency grid without causing unworkable levels of inter-channel interference. In an example embodiment, the optical pump comprises a laser whose single-mode output is modulated to sufficiently suppresses stimulated Brillouin scattering in the optical fiber while still keeping the optical power of each of the resulting pump bands spectrally compact, e.g., substantially contained within the slot width of the respective wavelength channel. In some embodiments, at least some pump bands can be spectrally interleaved with some of the data-carrying signals to increase the data-throughput capacity of the corresponding optical transport system.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.