Abstract

Dispersion compensation techniques aimed to upgrade 1.3 µm single mode fibers (SMF) for use in 1.5 µm optical communication systems are of great current interest. Several groups have utilized dispersion compensating fiber with large normal dispersion at 1550 nm to equalize the anomalous dispersion in SMF for lightwave system experiments [1, 2]. In our research we are applying these techniques to achieve dispersion equalization for femtosecond pulse transmission, for which not only the dispersion but also the dispersion slope must be compensated [3]. By using a special dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) with favorable dispersion characteristics [4], we demonstrate nearly dispersion-free propagation of ~60-fsec pulses over >40 m of fibers. Our experiments demonstrate an all-fiber dispersion compensation systems capable of 300-fold pulse recompression for sub-100-femtosecond pulses. Compared to other femtosecond fiber dispersion compensation experiments [5], we achieve nearly a factor of five higher compression ratio with approximately seven times shorter pulses. Furthermore, we apply spectral interferometry [6] to perform measurements of the dispersion properties of our concatenated fiber link.

© 1996 Optical Society of America