Abstract

Optical pulse compression is by now a well established technique for the generation of subpicoseconds and/or femtosecond pulses which can find applications in optical fiber communications systems and photonic switching. However, the technique requires light sources with appreciable peak powers, which are not generally available from compact sources. The reason for that is, either in a fiber-grating compressor or in a high-order soliton compressor, a nonlinear phase shift (chirp) must be induced on the signal pulse in order to be compensated by a dispersive delay line. To overcome this problem, a linear chirp can be produced across the signal pulse through cross-phase modulation induced by a copropagating intense pump pulse in an optical fiber.

© 1996 Optical Society of America