Broadband fiber dispersion compensation for sub-100-fs pulses with a compression ratio of 300

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.

A femtosecond code-division multiple-access communication system test bed

“…Several dispersion compensation schemes applicable to femtosecond pulse transmission have been demonstrated before that can compensate the chromatic dispersion of standard single-mode fibers [29]- [33]. Our dispersion compensation scheme based on the use of dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) [34] to compensate the quadratic dispersion and most of the cubic dispersion of standard single mode fiber (SMF), has been detailed previously [31]- [33]. Such an SMF-DCF fiber link has much lower third-order dispersion than conventional dispersion shifted fiber.…”

“…Further, by applying a cubic phase to the pixels of the programmable liquid crystal (LCM) in the encoder, we can almost completely remove the small residual third-order dispersion of the SMF-DCF link resulting in essentially distortionless transmission of sub-500 fs pulses over 2.5 km of optical fiber [33]. To our knowledge, these were the first experiments of dispersion compensation on a femtosecond time scale using dispersion compensating fiber [31] and the first demonstration of almost dispersion free transmission by applying residual phase correction via a programmable pulse-shaper [33]. In addition to its applicability in femtosecond CDMA systems, this dispersion compensation scheme can be used in any other transmission scheme that uses ultrashort pulses.…”

Third-Order Dispersion in Linearly Chirped Bragg Gratings and Its Compensation

“…When the LCBG is introduced in a Gaussian pulse transmission system, it is designed so that its quadratic dispersion compensates the second-order dispersion of the fiber and then it is the value of the cubic dispersion generated in the system that limits the system performance [14,15]. This cubic dispersion arises out of the fiber (typically 0.09 ps/nm 2 km [16]) and the third-order dispersion coefficient of the grating.…”

Optical fiber link for transmission of 1-nJ femtosecond laser pulses at 1550 nm

“…Chang et al [6] demonstrated nearly dispersion-free transmission of sub-100-fs pulses in the low picojoule energy range over a 42 m concatenated single-mode fiber (SMF) -DCF fiber link. In this and similar dispersion compensation experiments the idea is to match the dispersion of the SMF with the dispersion of a piece of DCF that has the same magnitude but is opposite in sign.…”