Abstract

Short optical pulses are desirable in a large variety of applications when time resolution, large bandwidth or high peak powers are necessary. In many cases nonlinear pulse compression is required to produce such pulses. Typically, the main component of such a compressor is a long optical fiber. Fiber Bragg gratings (and more generally, photonic bandgap structures) are very dispersive elements, which allow scaling down of the compressor to centimeter lengths. Here we present various pulse compression schemes based on such gratings to achieve small, versatile, all-fiber pulse compressors.

© 1999 Optical Society of America