Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers Design Toolbox

Design toolbox allows parameter selection by solving lasers/amplifiers for various L,R,P,lambda etc

** Run "FiberAnalysis()" to start **

This toolbox provides steady-state analysis of both erbium-doped and ytterbium-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers, allowing good design choices to be made for experiment.

Various calculations and simulations are provided that give full understanding of impact of varying parameters such as
- active fiber length
- pump power
- wavelength
- coupler reflectivity (for lasers)
- cavity losses (for lasers)
- signal power (for amplifiers)

A litany of plots can be made, including:
- small signal gain for various wavelengths, fiber lengths, pump powers
- distribution of pump, signal, ASE powers and ion excitation ratios along fiber
- comparison plots for lasers, showing effect of varying parameters R, L, [losses] on laser performance
- comparison plots for amplifiers, showing effect of varying parameters L, Pp, Ps on amplifier performance
- ASE plots for amplifiers, showing power across emission spectrum

This is version 1, so no claims to be perfect, but this work reflects extensive literature exploration and has been validated by comparison with >10 papers, principally:
- Barnard et al, "Analytical Model for Rare-Earth Doped Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers", 1994
- Pask et al, "Ytterbium-Doped Silica Fiber Lasers: Versatile Sources for the 1-1.2um Region", 1995
- Paschotta et al, "Ytterbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers", 1997
- Kelson and Hardy, "Strongly Pumped Fiber Lasers", 1998
- Bellemare, "Continuous-wave Silica-Based Erbium-Doped Fibre Lasers", 2003
Moreover the numerical solutions in the toolbox have been internally validated by comparison with the analytical solutions, and it agrees with my own experimental results.

So, please let me know if/as you find bugs or mistakes!

Happy designing.

6/14/13 -- Updated FDTD solution method, added support for cladding-pumping
6/17/13 -- Added support for counter-propagating pumping, validated ASE calculations (forward and backward over arbitrary wavelengths)
6/19/13 -- Added spectroscopy functions GetYbSpectrum and GetErSpectrum to the package; inadvertently left out of original
6/26/13 -- Added another stupid supporting file left out of original package
7/8/13 -- Corrected bug in laser power vs reflectance function (applies to linear resonators only).
7/17/13 -- Bug fix to number of points
7/22/13 -- Calculates powers along fiber in lasers: gives snapshot of signal, pump, and ASE power distribution in active fiber