11/14/2019 Joseph Park, ECE ILLINOIS
Written by Joseph Park, ECE ILLINOIS
Pan's work focuses on a new type of erbium doped fiber which forms the backbone for amplifiers used in long-haul optical communication systems. However, erbium is a relatively weak laser material and very little of it can be dissolved into the glass comprising the fiber. Consequently, conventional erbium doped fiber amplifiers use very long fiber lengths which lead to a wide range of parasitic characteristics.
Pan's work is on glasses that are allowed to have much higher ebrium doping concentrations, thereby helping to solve problems intrinsic to its low-strength spectroscopic properties.
Her work was funded by the High Energy Joint Transition Office (HE-JTO) and the Office of Naval Research. This award was sponsored by SPIE.
"This fiber, being heavily doped, required fiber lengths of only a few centimeters to be used in her apparatus, as opposed to the tens of meters typically found in an erbium doped fiber amplifier. If this wasn't enough, these first prototype fibers were few-moded, introducing yet another degree of complexity in understanding how the fiber functions. Guanyi was able to work through these numerous obstacles and achieve something nobody has been able to do before."