Dispersion-free fiber transmission for femtosecond pulses by use of a dispersion-compensating fiber and a programmable pulse shaper

Abstract

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.

Intracavity characterization of micro-comb generation in the single-soliton regime

“…The output from the drop port is relayed to the autocorrelator via standard single-mode fiber through a pair of erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA) and a programmable pulse shaper. We carefully trim the quadratic and the cubic phases applied on the pulse shaper to achieve dispersion compensation for the entire propagation path subsequent to the silicon nitride chip [23]. We test this by injecting a pulse from a mode-locked fiber laser into the fiber link directly after the chip.…”

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

“…The laser output is externally filtered by a bandpass filter resulting in 275 fs pulses, with an average power of 40 W, at a repetition rate of 30 MHz. A complete description of the laser construction may be found in [33]; only the intensity autocorrelation traces and spectra from the laser before and after the bandpass filter are shown in Fig. 2 demonstrating clean transform-limited laser operation.…”

“…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.…”

Direct amplitude shaping of high harmonics in the extreme ultraviolet

“…Pulse shaping of ultrashort laser pulses by phase and amplitude manipulation of their spectral components in Fourier space [1] has proved a very effective tool in a variety of photonics and spectroscopy applications, ranging from fiber communications [2,3], waveform characterization [4], radio frequency photonics [5] to nonlinear microscopy [6,7] and coherent quantum control [2,8,9]. Although these works addressed very diverse spectral regions, to date a complete and independent control over the spectral amplitude and phase of HHs has been hindered by the technological difficulties associated with XUV optics.…”