Abstract

High-repetition-rate, short-duration soliton trains in optical fibers have attracted considerable attention due to their potential application to telecommunications. Adiabatic Raman compression is a powerful technique for generating such trains and has been applied to the output of electro-absorption modulators (EAMs)¹ and gain- switched diode lasers.² Both components have drawbacks with the latter suffering from low- quality output pulses and EAMs from a high cost and limited availability. Furthermore, both introduce chirp to the pulses. An alternative low-cost source of high-repetition-rate pulse trains is the LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder amplitude modulator (MZ-AM) that generates high-quality pulses, but with longer pulse durations.

© 2002 Optical Society of America