Higher-Order Soliton Compression of Optical Pulses from 5 ps to 20 fs by a 15.1-m-long Single-Stage Step-like Dispersion Profiled Fiber

Abstract

It has been successfully demonstrated to compress 5 ps optical pulses down to 20 fs by a 15.1-m-long single-stage step-like dispersion profiled fiber (SDPF) through a series of the higher-order soliton compression processes in conjunction with a single and ordinary erbium-doped fiber preamplifier. The SDPF compressor contains two kinds of dispersion-flattened fibers (DFFs) at its end and was composed by fiber-splicing with an aid of an extremely careful cutback method. In addition, we have compared the measured compression profiles in the 20–100 fs range with simulation results calculated on the bases of a few elementary soliton models and some experimentally extracted parameters, which is aimed to investigate and clarify its compression mechanism. It was found out that the standard nonlinear Schroedinger equation works appropriately to some extent even in the 30–100 fs range for the DFF used here, although some difficulty exists in modeling the pulse width evolution in the sub-30 fs range as far as the parameters that we used are concerned.

Progress in Ultrafast Photonics

“…Theoretical analysis has shown that the fourth-order dispersion term is non-negligible. 43,44) For the application of ultrashort optical pulses to real systems, the quality of optical pulses is an important issue. As pointed out by Nakazawa and his colleagues, the propagation of the fundamental soliton generates the least parametric noise.…”

“…2. Soliton effect pulse compression below 20 fs controlling fourthorder dispersion (Igarashi et al17) ). (a) Second harmonic autocorrelation trace.…”

50 fs soliton compression of optical clock pulse recovered from NRZ data injected SOAFL

“…Alternatively, the four-stage soliton compression of the gain-switching laser diode (GSLD) pulse was also reported with shortest pulsewidth approaching 20 fs in 1999 [10]. Later on, a simplified single-stage high-order soliton compressor two kinds of step-like dispersion profiled fibers of only 15-m long was employed to shorten the GSLD pulsewidth from 5 ps to 20 fs [11]. Relatively few works were emerged before year 2000 for compressing < 100-fs actively mode-locked fiber laser pulses.…”