Benjamin Klein

Gain Saturation
A gas which has been pumped to achieve inversion ( ) which is used to
amplify light via stimulated emission is an optical ampli er.  The amount of
ampli cation that can be extracted from an optical ampli er is limited, which is not
surprising.  The physical mechanism that limits the ampli cation is called gain
saturation, and we’ll explore it here.

The physical mechanism underlying gain saturation can be explained pretty easily.
 The stimulated emission rate is proportional to the density of excited atoms as
well as the intensity of the light .  As always, the only way to obtain a large is
by pumping the gas.  As the intensity of the light increases, the stimulated
emission rate increases as well.   Each stimulated emission event adds a photon
to the optical beam, but also removes an excited atom, lowering .  If the rate of
stimulated emission exceeds the rate at which atoms are pumped into the excited
state, will decrease, thus decreasing the stimulated emission rate and therefore
the ampli cation.  So, you can see that an ampli er can be self-limiting – if it
ampli es the optical intensity too much, it will speed up the stimulated emission
rate su ciently to lower and reduce the optical ampli cation.

All of this implies that the gain per length of the ampli er may depend upon
the intensity of the light .  We can show this explicitly by solving the rate
equations we’ve derived.  Let’s take the rate equation for , and add in a pumping
rate that represents some pumping mechanism (discharge, optical to another
level, or whatever):

Let’s assume that the pump rate and the intensity are very large, so that we
can approximately neglect the spontaneous emission rate.  Solving this equation
in steady state under these approximations gives us
This is just saying that in the limit of large pumping and large intensity, in steady
state the pump rate + absorption rate must exactly balance the stimulated
emission rate.  Now recall that the gain per length .
 Substituting in, we can see that in this particular limit,

So for large intensities and pump rates, the gain per length varies inversely with
the intensity, due to the physical effect we described at the top of this section.
 This is gain saturation.

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