We report the characteristics of GHz bandwidth amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from a hot Cs atom vapor cell, where the optical feedback was inhibited. When pumped by an 852 nm laser, both forward and backward ASE output near 894 nm showed a nonlinear increase in its power without a pump power threshold. A continual decrease in spectral width down to 4.7 GHz was experimentally observed as the ASE output power increased. Using the same vapor cell, we injected a 1mW signal to configure a single-pass optical amplifier, and we monitored the forward output both in temporal and spectral domains. We found the signal laser efficiently suppressed the ASE and obtained a large amplification factor over 700 at the pump power of 1.2 W.

We study the amplification properties of an optical amplifier based on a cesium-vapor cell. An optical amplification system including cesium vapor mixed with a buffer gas is built, and its amplification feature is investigated as a function of the size of the incident beam and the temperature of the cesium-vapor cell. We observe that the optical amplification properties, such as amplification factor and extraction efficiency, change significantly depending on the temperature and beam diameter of the pump and seed light. A maximum extraction efficiency of 56% is obtained when the temperature of the cesium cell is 90 degrees C, with a 200-mu m diameter of the pump (500 mW) and seed light (10 mW). The numerical simulation of the amplification properties agrees reasonably with the results obtained from the experiment.

We demonstrate continuous-wave operation of an all-fiber thulium-holmium codoped laser operating at a wavelength of 1706.3 nm. To realize laser operation in the short-wavelength region of the emission-band edge of thulium in silica fiber, we employ fiber Bragg gratings having resonant reflection at a wavelength around 1700 nm as a wavelength-selective mirror in an all-fiber cavity scheme. We first examine the performance of the laser by adjusting the central wavelength of the in-band pump source. Although a pump source possessing a longer wavelength is observed to provide reduced laser threshold power and increased slope efficiency, because of the characteristics of spectral response in the gain fiber, we find that the optimal pump wavelength is 1565 nm to obtain maximum laser output power for a given system. We further explore the properties of the laser by varying the fiber gain length from 1 m to 1.4 m, for the purpose of power scaling. It is revealed that the laser shows optimal performance in terms of output power and slope efficiency at a gain length of 1.3 m, where we obtain a maximum output power of 249 mW for an applied pump power of 2.1 W. A maximum slope efficiency is also estimated to be 23% under these conditions.