Abstract-This paper reports comprehensive experimental results on a femtosecond code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication system test bed operating over optical fiber in the 1.5 m communication band. Our test bed integrates together several novel subsystems, including low-loss fiber-pigtailed pulse shapers for encoding-decoding, use of dispersion equalizing fibers in dispersion compensated links for femtosecond pulse transmission and also in femtosecond chirped pulse amplification (CPA) erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA's), and high-contrast nonlinear fiber-optic thresholders. The individual subsystems are described, and single-user system level experimental results demonstrating the ability to transmit spectrally encoded femtosecond pulses over a 2.5-km dispersion compensated fiber link followed by decoding and high contrast nonlinear thresholding are presented.

We demonstrate nearly distortionless 2.5-km fiber transmission of sub-500-fs pulses, using a combination of standard single-mode fiber, dispersion-compensating fiber, and a programmable pulse shaper for simultaneous quadratic and cubic dispersion compensation. The dispersion-compensating fiber corrects the bulk of the quadratic and the cubic phases for the single-mode fiber, and the fiber-pigtailed programmable pulse shaper exactly compensates the residual dispersion terms. Together these elements permit complete recompression of pulses, which first broaden by ~400 times in the single-mode fiber.

No abstract

We report what is, to our knowledge, the first experimental demonstration of nearly dispersion-free transmission of sub-100-fs pulses over several tens of meters of fiber. 62-fs pulses are broadened initially and recompressed by a ratio of 300 over a 42-m concatenated fiber link consisting of standard single-mode and dispersioncompensating fibers. This dispersion-compensated fiber link is estimated to have a third-order dispersion ~6 times lower than that of dispersion-shifted fiber.

No abstract