Enhanced soliton-effect pulse compression by cross-phase modulation in optical fibers

A new technique is proposed to enhance the soliton-effect compression of optical pulses. It consists of copropagating two optical pulses with close wavelengths in the negative group-velocity dispersion regime of single-mode fibers. When compared with the conventional soliton-effect pulse compression technique in which only one pulse is involved, this technique, as shown by numerical simulations, can not only dramatically increase the compression ratio but also decrease the optimum fiber length, by utilizing cross-phase modulation between copropagating pulses. It is also shown that the above cross-phase modulation induced enhancement of pulse compression is more significant in the sub-picosecond regime than in the picosecond regime. This scheme is particularly useful for the case in which the peak powers of the pulses obtained from lasers are not high enough for efficient conventional soliton-effect compression to take place. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.