A 104GHz 328fs soliton pulse train generation through a comb-like dispersion profiled fiber using short high nonlinearity dispersion fibers

摘要

The short optical pulse sources with high repetition rates are expected to play a key role for increasing transmission capacity in future. Since electric methods are difficult to generate pulses at a repetition rate of higher than 100GHz, soliton pulse compression of the beat modulation between two optical carriers [1] is an attractive method for applications in time division multiplexed (TDM) optical communications. This technique permits us to use standard tunable laser sources and to tune the repetition rate and the center wavelength of the pulse train simply by adjusting the frequencies of the input lasers. The techniques of beat signal conversion were previously demonstrated with dispersion-decreasing fiber (DDF)[2]. An alternative approach is to profile the fiber dispersion using segments of conventional fibers with different dispersions. Using a comb-like dispersion profiled fiber (CDPF) consisting of alternating segments of dispersion shifted and standard telecommunication fibers (DSF and STF) respectively [3][4], high repetition rate sub-picosecond pulse trains were generated. Also, a soliton pulse train was generated using a CDPF comprising only two pairs of DSF and STF [5]. One of the merits of CDPF is that we can control the dispersion and the nonlinear phase shifts by selecting appropriate lengths of fiber segments so that a soliton pulse propagation is realized. Previous works on a CDPF have utilized conventional standard DSF and STF. In this report, we have constructed a short CDPF using a newly developed high nonlinearity (HNL) DSF [6] and generated a 104GHz soliton pulse train with 328fs pulsewidth.