Abstract

In this paper we present a simple method of production of tunable soliton pulses of picosecond duration around 1545 nm. Our system uses solely passive techniques to produce and modify, both temporally and spectrally, a stable stream of soliton pulses, which represents simplifications over previous techniques to produce such pulses¹, which have required implementation of active techniques. This source has potential as a general laboratory tool with a tuning range of >50nm, making it a viable alternative to other sources such as colour centre lasers. The availability of high peak pulse powers also makes it an attractive source for second and third order non-linear effects such as second harmonic generation, cascaded optical non-linearities and optical switching.

© 1996 Optical Society of America