Investigation on gain characteristics in non-degenerate cascaded phase sensitive parametric amplifiers

We theoretically and experimentally show the impact of the ratio between the signal and idler generated from the PIA part on the gain characteristics in the continuous wave (CW) pump non-degenerate cascaded phase-sensitive fiber optical parametric amplifier (PS-FOPA). The results show that the length of highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) used for generating the idler can cause the variation of power ratio between the idler and signal, which significantly affects the gain characteristics of the PS-FOPA under the small signal gain condition. To obtain high gain, it is better to choose long HNLF to generate idler. In our experiment, 5. 5 dB gain and 18 nm bandwidth (on/off gain>10 dBm) in PS-FOPA can be achieved when 300 m-long HNLF instead of 200 m-long HNLF is used in PIA.