Abstract

Modulational instability (MI) in optical fibers can be used to obtain high-repetition-rate pulse trains for potential research-and-development applications in telecommunications. MI yields short pulses from continuous-wave (CW) light when amplitude fluctuations are amplified and compressed due to self-phase modulation (SPM) and anomalous dispersion in a fiber.¹ Efficient self-induced ring configurations have been presented which incorporate an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) as a complementary gain mechanism.² Exceeding the MI threshold generally requires high pump powers due to the low nonlinearity of most fibers. However, the threshold is reduced in highly nonlinear dispersion- shifted fibers (HNL-DSF) due to typically ten-times-higher nonlinear coefficients.

© 2002 Optical Society of America