Simultaneous Amplification and Compression of Ultrashort Solitons in an Erbium-Doped Nonlinear Amplifying Fiber Loop Mirror

A simple technique for simultaneous amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons is proposed. It is based on an erbium-doped nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirror. Numerical simulations show that, unlike conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in which nonlinear effects lead to serious degradation of pulse quality, the proposed device performs efficient high-quality amplification and compression of ultrashort solitons while nearly preserving the soliton nature of the input pulses. We have also studied the effects of loop characteristics, nonsoliton input pulses, and higher order fiber effects on the device performance and show that the proposed scheme is fairly insensitive to small variations in both the loop and input pulse parameters.