Dispersion-free fiber transmission for femtosecond pulses by use of a dispersion-compensating fiber and a programmable pulse shaper.

We demonstrate nearly distortionless 2.5-km fiber transmission of sub-500-fs pulses, using a combination of standard single-mode fiber, dispersion-compensating fiber, and a programmable pulse shaper for simultaneous quadratic and cubic dispersion compensation. The dispersion-compensating fiber corrects the bulk of the quadratic and the cubic phases for the single-mode fiber, and the fiber-pigtailed programmable pulse shaper exactly compensates the residual dispersion terms. Together these elements permit complete recompression of pulses, which first broaden by ~400 times in the single-mode fiber.