Abstract

Access to soliton pulses of short pulse duration is an important prerequisite in many applications of solitons for optical fibre communication purposes. A number of methods for compressing solitons in optical fibers without generating nonsolitonic radiation modes has been suggested, e.g. adiabatic soliton compression by slow amplification [1] or by slowly decreasing dispersion [2]. In the present work we show that a properly tailored and rapidly increasing gain in an optical fiber can provide a fast, but still adiabatic, soliton amplification and concomitant efficient soliton compression for fiber lengths even shorter than the characteristic dispersion length. Using the variational approach, [3], explicit expressions are given for the required variation of the inhomogeneous gain and the resulting pulse compression. The validity of the analytical predictions are verified by comparison with numerical simulations of the pulse dynamics.

© 1996 Optical Society of America