Performance Improvement of Distributed and Discrete Raman Amplifiers with a Fibre Loop Mirror

We use a fibre loop mirror to reflect the residual pump power (RPP) into the fibre for solving the problems of the RPP in Raman amplifiers. The experimental results show that the novel bi-directional pumping scheme without adding extra pump lasers is effective, and higher gain and lower noise are obtained for both the distributed and the discrete Raman amplifiers.