Realizing a robust optical pulse compressor operating at 850 nm using a photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

This work stems from the motivation of a recent investigation on single- and pulse-train compression schemes using solid core as well as chloroform-filled photonic crystal fiber (PCF), with both hyperbolic secant and raised-cosine pulse profiles. To study the robustness of the proposed optical pulse compressor, we perturb the loss coefficient and study the deviations in the pedestal energy and compression factor for both pulse profiles. To this end, we perturb the loss coefficient of the solid core PCF over a range of % and, in a similar way, we carry out this study for the chloroform-filled PCF, but with the perturbation restricted to a lower level, i.e. over a range of % due to the higher value of the nonlinear growth rate. We compare the intensity profiles of the perturbed compressed pulses with that of an unperturbed pulse. Although the self-similar analysis essentially demands that the loss coefficient matches the nonlinear growth rate for the realization of ideal pulse compressors, based on the numerical results we confirm that the proposed compressor is capable of producing good quality short pulses with negligible amount of pedestals and high compression factor even if there is a deviation of admissible level from the above mentioned condition. Consequently, we corroborate that the proposed compressor is very robust against perturbations.

Keywords:

• nonlinear ultrafast optics
• photonic crystal fiber
• pulse compression
• ultrashort pulse
• stability analysis
• soliton
• raised-cosine pulses

Acknowledgements

KSN acknowledges DST (SR/FTP/PS-66/2009) and CSIR [03(1264)/12/EMR-II], Government of India, for financial support through the project.