A novel technique to generate ultrashort fundamental solitons is proposed and demonstrated numerically. The technique utilizes both the multisoliton pulse-compression effect and the switching characteristics of a nonlinear optical loop mirror constructed from dispersion-decreasing fiber. We show that, in contrast to the conventional soliton-effect pulse compression in which compressed pulses ar...

Projected demands in information bandwidth have resulted in a paradigm shift from electrical to optical interconnects. Switches, modulators and wavelength converters have all been demonstrated on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor compatible platforms, and are important for all optical signal and information processing. Similarly, pulse compression is crucial for creating short pulses nece...

We demonstrate the generation of 9.8+/-0.3 fs laser pulses with a peak power exceeding one terawatt at 30 Hz repetition rate, using optical parametric chirped pulse amplification. The amplifier is pumped by 140 mJ, 60 ps pulses at 532 nm, and amplifies seed pulses from a Ti:Sapphire oscillator to 23 mJ/pulse, resulting in 10.5 mJ/pulse after compression while amplified fluorescence is kept belo...

Temporal compressions of optical pulses and pulse trains have been performed by the photon-echo process in Tm-doped YAG at 793 nm. Single-pulse temporal compression by almost a factor of 500 from 10 micros to 22 ns and pulse train compression by a factor of 14 from 5micros to 350 ns with a high-speed frequency-tunable external-cavity diode laser are demonstrated. It is suspected that significan...

Abstract A non-integrable, variable coefficient nonlinear Schrödinger equation which governs the nonlinear pulse propagation in an inhomogeneous medium is considered. The same equation is also applicable to optical pulse propagation in averaged, dispersion-managed optical fiber systems, or fiber systems with phase modulation and pulse compression. Multi-scale asymptotic techniques are employed ...

We describe and demonstrate a system which can be used with many types of actively modelocked lasers to create a source of variable width picosecond pulses. This system is an active compression scheme which incorporates a resonant electro-optic quadratic phase modulator to impart the linear frequency chirp on an optical pulse. To demonstrate, we used the modulator to chirp the 85 ps pulses from...

We report programmable shaping of femtosecond optical pulses by use of a multielement liquid-crystal modulator to manipulate the phases of spatially dispersed optical frequency components. Our approach provides for continuously variable control of the optical phase and permits the pulse shape to be reconfigured on a millisecond time scale. We use the apparatus to demonstrate femtosecond pulse-p...

We present a method for efficiently exciting a Bragg soliton with a spectral content located mostly within the bandgap of a one-dimensional periodic structure. The method is based on a new interaction between Bragg solitons and on a high intensity enhancement, caused owing to the reduced propagation velocity inside periodic structures. Our method can also be used for efficient compression of op...

An optical pulse compressor is investigated over a large range of compression factors, fiber lengths and laser powers. The given theory for zero group velocity dispersion is valid over the investigated range of grating-prism distances. The influence of stimulated Raman scattering limited the feasible compression factors due to instabilities of the output pulse. For long fiber lengths it is expe...