Temporal solitons and pulse compression in photonic crystal waveguides

Solitons are nonlinear waves that exhibit invariant or recurrent behaviour as they propagate. Precise control of dispersion and nonlinear effects governs soliton propagation and, through the formation of higher-order solitons, permits pulse compression. In recent years the development of photonic crystals—highly dispersive periodic dielectric media—has attracted a great deal of attention due to the facility to engineer and enhance both their nonlinear and dispersive effects. In this Article, we demonstrate the first experimental observations of optical solitons and pulse compression in ∼1-mm-long photonic crystal waveguides. Suppression of two-photon absorption in the GaInP material is crucial to these observations. Compression of 3-ps pulses to a minimum duration of 580 fs with a simultaneously low pulse energy of ∼20 pJ is achieved. These small-footprint devices open up the possibility of transferring soliton applications into integrated photonic chips.