Energy transfer between excited rare-earth ions has been widely used for realizing upconversion lasers and also recognized as a gain limiting factor in high-concentration Er-doped amplifiers. The energy transfer leads to upconversion of the excitation which for randomly distributed (not clustered) ions is called homogeneous upconversion. It was commonly assumed that the rate of homogeneous upconversion is a linear function of the population inversion N_2. However, recently published Monte Carlo simulations predict that the homogeneous upconversion rate is a nonlinear function of N_2 and that it, moreover, depends on the pump and signals rates. In this paper we review some of our experimental results confirming those predictions. We also propose a statistical, analytical model describing the observed homogeneous upconversion behavior in Er-doped fibers.
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