Abstract

The temporal self-imaging effect, also named temporal Talbot effect, occurs when periodic trains of optical pulses propagate through a first-order dispersive medium [1]. An appropriate amount of dispersion leads either to reproduction of the original pulse train or repetition-rate multiplication by an integer factor. This phenomenon has found practical application in optical communications and ultrafast optical signal processing because it allows one to increase the repetition rate of a given low-rate pulse source in a simple way. Traditional implementations of the temporal Talbot effect include single-mode fibers [2] and linearly chirped fiber Bragg gratings [1]. The so-called Talbot condition provides the first-order dispersion amount required to generate the temporal self-images of an input pulse train.

© 2009 IEEE