Monolithic Low-Noise Erbium-Doped Thin-Film Lithium Niobate Waveguide Amplifier with 18 dB Fiber to Fiber Net Gain

Erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers have captured great attention in recent years due to the rapid advance in photonic integration materials and fabrication techniques. In this work, a compact erbium-doped thin-film lithium niobate waveguide amplifier integrated with high-efficiency edge couplers on the small footprint of 2 × 25 mm, achieving >18 dB fiber-to-fiber (off-chip) net gain with bidirectional pumping by ∼1480 nm laser diodes, is fabricated by the photolithography-assisted chemomechanical etching technique. The fiber-to-fiber noise figures of the amplifier are also characterized to be around 5 dB, and the maximum amplified signal powers at the output fiber are above 13 dBm. Theoretical amplifier modeling, resolving the erbium absorption and emission spectra, predicts the efficient gain scaling with waveguide length for most of the telecom C-band wavelengths. The demonstrated high-external-gain erbium-doped waveguide amplifier will benefit various applications from optical communication and metrology to integrated photonic computing and artificial intelligence.