IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 5, NO.

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Dispersion Compensation Using Only Fiber Bragg Gratings

Paul Petruzzi, Curt Lowry, and Ponniah Sivanesan
Abstract Efcient and low-cost dispersion compensation is necessary to achieve useful transmission distances in optical communication systems at bit rates above 10 Gb/s. In this paper, we present a novel method for dispersion compensation that uses three ber gratings in series. This method eliminates the requirement for an optical circulator, commonly used in gratingbased dispersion compensators. As a result, our device will be inexpensive to fabricate and have a low insertion loss. We present a theoretical model that predicts how the efciency of the device can be maximized. We also present experimental results showing complete dispersion compensation for 30-ps pulses, broadened to 67 ps by propagating through 10 km of standard, singlemode ber. Index Terms Chirped ber grating, cladding modes, dispersion compensation, ber grating.

I. INTRODUCTION PTICAL ber communication systems are primarily operated at wavelengths near 1550 nm in order to coincide with the minimum loss point of silica ber and thereby maximize transmission distance. Unfortunately, at this wavelength, there is a signicant amount (typically 17 ps/nm/km) of group velocity dispersion (GVD) that limits the achievable propagation distance. For a system that operates at a data rate greater than 10 Gb/s, the maximum distance is on the order of kilometers. Beyond this distance, GVD induces signal pulse broadening that causes signicant overlap of neighboring pulses and results in signal corruption. This problem can be solved by inserting an element that imposes GVD on the optical signal that is opposite to that imposed by the ber, thereby compensating for the naturally occurring GVD. Currently, there are three common methods of performing dispersion compensation: 1) adding dispersion compensating (DC) ber, 2) reversing optical signal chirp through optical phase conjugation, and 3) inserting a chirped ber grating to impose compensating GVD. DC ber has high negative dispersion that is typically near 90 ps/nm/km. A pulse that has been broadened by the positive GVD of a singlemode ber (SMF) such as SMF28 can be compressed back to its original width using the negative GVD of DC ber. Typical GVD values require an approximately 5:1 length ratio of SMF to DC ber types. Transmission distances of a single channel over 960 km [1]
Manuscript received January 4, 1999; revised May 3, 1999. P. Petruzzi and C. Lowry are with Laboratory for Physical Sciences, College Park, MD 20740 USA. P. Sivanesan is with Smart Structures and Materials Research Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20721 USA. Publisher Item Identier S 1077-260X(99)07929-0.

at 10 Gb/s, and more recently, 32 channels at 20 Gb/s [2] over 1200 km have been reported using various DC ber congurations. This technique has the advantage of being passive in that it does not require applied power for operation. It is also broadband and can be used in high bit-rate or WDM systems. However, this technique has the disadvantage of inducing signicant power loss (typically 0.7 dB/km) and incurring signicant expense, compared to the use of SMF-28 ber alone. These problems become more important when an existing ber link is being upgraded to a higher bit rate. The high loss and long length of DC ber required for dispersion compensation make it necessary to add an optical amplier to the link which further increases link complexity and cost. The pulse stretching induced by the positive GVD of SMF also induces pulse frequency chirp. The effect of GVD on a signal can be eliminated by reversing the pulse chirp and then propagating the signal through another equal length of SMF. Chirp reversal can be accomplished through optical phase conjugation by using four-wave mixing in a DC ber or a semiconductor optical amplier. Continued propagation through a medium with positive GVD can then compress the pulse back to its original width. This method has been used to transmit signals 400 km at 2.5 Gb/s [3] and 152 km at 5 Gb/s [4], but it typically induces 20-dB loss due the low efciency of four-wave mixing (FWM). Chirped ber gratings induce different time delays for different wavelengths. This rechirping can be designed to reshape a pulse that was broadened by GVD and compress it back to its original width. Chirped gratings can be made to affect a broad-band [5] of optical signals or a narrow-band [6], depending on the application. In addition, they are compact, passive, and have low insertion loss. This method of dispersion compensation has allowed 10 Gb/s data to be transmitted 100 [7], 500 [8], and 700 km [9] without using a repeater, and it is coming into wide use in optical networks. However, with this method, the optical signal is back-reected by the chirped grating and travels back along the input ber. An optical circulator is required to separate the back-traveling signal from the incoming light in order to allow the rechirped signal to continue propagation along the communication link. While the gratings are inexpensive and have low insertion loss, the optical circulator is an expensive component. The circulator also induces approximately 3-dB signal loss for the required double pass. This circulator loss in turn makes greater optical amplication necessary and further increases system cost. Eliminating the need for an optical circulator would allow us to take advantage of the inherent low cost and low insertion

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Fig. 1. Optical signal is reected into a back-traveling cladding mode by grating-2, then into a forward-traveling cladding mode by grating-1, and nally into a forward-traveling core mode by grating-3.

loss of chirped ber gratings and it would permit existing systems to be upgraded to higher bit rates without requiring additional optical amplication. Dispersion compensation has been done without requiring optical circulators by using longperiod gratings. However, one technique uses a ber with a larger core [10], compared to SMF-28, which induces loss when the light is coupled back into standard SMF-28 ber. Another technique uses two long-period gratings [11] in SMF but requires critical constraints on the grating separation. In this paper, we present a novel method of dispersion compensation that uses three ber gratings and does not require an optical circulator or critical grating spacing. This method induces only low insertion loss and can eliminate the expense of both the circulator and the amplier. We use coupled mode theory to model and explain propagation through our gratings. We also experimentally demonstrate complete compensation of dispersion induced in a 30-ps pulse by propagation through 10 km of SMF-28 ber. II. CONCEPT Traditionally, ber grating dispersion compensators use an optical circulator to distinguish forward and backward propagating light. In our design, we distinguish forward and backward propagating light by using three gratings in series to couple light into different cladding modes. Fig. 1 schematically shows the operation of the gratings. Light enters the ber section, propagating in the core or LP mode, and passes through grating-1 without being affected. It is then backreected by grating-2 and coupled into a backward traveling cladding mode, LP . Because grating-2 can be properly chirped, it can also compress the pulse by inducing negative GVD. The compressed pulse is then reected by grating-1 into a forward traveling cladding mode, LP . The LP mode in turn passes through grating-2 without being affected. Finally, the light is coupled back into the forward traveling LP mode by grating-3. Grating-1 and grating-2 each perform two operations. Each grating is transparent to light in one mode and reective of light of another mode. This is accomplished by properly designing the period of each grating, while considering the incoming and outgoing modes and the wavelength of the light. The combined effect of these two operations allows light to be twice back-reected by the gratings and, without an optical circulator, regain its original, forward direction of propagation. As a result, one or more of the gratings can be chirped to create a ber grating system for dispersion compensation which does not require an optical circulator.

Fig. 2. F-ber Bragg grating reects a core mode into a core mode (large peak) and also couples the core mode into cladding modes (small peaks).

Eliminating the need for a circulator in grating-based dispersion compensators signicantly reduces the cost and fabrication complexity of the device. Gratings are written by placing a phase or amplitude mask over a section of properly prepared ber and illuminating it with UV ( 244 nm) light [12]. If a template is made with three adjacent masks, the entire device can be made at one time, simplifying fabrication. Also, the operation of the device is not interferometric, so the distance between the gratings, and consequently the separation between the masks, is not critical. Important design issues for our device are the ability of gratings to couple strongly to cladding modes and have a bandwidth large enough to accommodate the incoming signal. Long-period gratings inherently have a high coupling efciency to cladding modes and a large bandwidth [13]. These gratings meet our design specications and are currently commercially available. There are also commercially available reection gratings that have reection efciencies greater than 30 dB. However, this efciency refers to the coupling strength between forward and backward traveling core modes. Our device requires core to cladding mode coupling with similar efciencies. Methods for designing to this purpose will be discussed in the next section. III. THEORY A ber grating is typically made using a frequency doubled argon or excimer laser and a phase mask [14]. The phase mask creates a sinusoidally varying interference pattern that interacts with the germanium in the core of the ber to create a periodic variation in the index of refraction in the ber core. The transmission spectrum of a grating fabricated in this fashion is shown in Fig. 2. The large peak represents reection of a forward traveling core mode into a backward traveling core mode (core mode resonance). The smaller peaks on the short wavelength side of the large peak represent reection of a forward traveling core mode into a backward traveling cladding mode (cladding mode resonance). Cladding mode resonances like these are used in the operation of our threegrating dispersion compensator. In order for our device to be have low insertion loss, there must be much stronger coupling to cladding modes than seen in Fig. 2. This can be accomplished by blazing the grating. In a blazed grating, the index of refraction pattern mentioned

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Fig. 3. Induced change in the index of refraction of a blazed grating is tilted, with respect to the axis, to increase the coupling efciency from the incident (LPjk ) to the reected (LPlm ) mode by the grating.

above is tilted with respect to the direction of propagation ( direction), as illustrated in Fig. 3. Using coupled mode theory, the coefcient for coupling from an incident LP mode to a reected LP mode by a blazed grating is found to be [15]

Fig. 4. Blazed ber grating reduces the coupling core mode resonance ( 1563 nm) and increases the coupling of the cladding mode resonances ( 1561 nm).

 <

(1) where is related to the amplitude of induced index change, is the transverse electric eld of the LP mode, and is the transverse electric eld of the LP mode. This equation shows that the coupling between two modes is due to two factors: 1) the overlap between their transverse electric elds and 2) the phase matching completed by the blaze angle of the grating. Using this result, the maximum reectivity at the resonance is [16] (2) where is the length of the grating. For the unblazed grating shown in Fig. 2, the wavelength, maximum reectivity, and bandwidth of the core mode resonance was measured. Then, (18), (20), and (30) from [14] were used to calculate period, amplitude, and length of the grating. These values were then substituted into (1) and (2) above and the coupling of the LP mode to the LP mode was calculated to be 47%. This is in fairly good agreement with our measured value of 37%. Using the same grating period, amplitude, and length, the coupling of an LP mode to an LP mode by a grating with a blaze angle of 6 was calculated to be 94%. In this example, introducing the proper blaze angle, by rotating the phase mask with respect to the ber, doubled the coupling efciency. The cause of the increase is not that the LP mode has a larger portion of its eld conned to the core, compared to the LP mode, and thus has a larger overlap with the LP mode. Rather, the large increase in coupling is due to improved phase matching of the core mode to the cladding mode by the blazed grating [17]. The coupling can be further enhanced by increasing the amplitude or the length of the grating as shown by (1) and (2). This is evident in the transmission spectrum of a commercially available blazed grating, shown in Fig. 4. In this grating, the coupling to the rst cladding mode is greater than 40 dB.

A second design requirement for efcient operation of our three-grating compensator is the existence of spectral regions between the cladding modes where the grating reection is low. These regions are necessary because, as illustrated in Fig. 1, the LP mode must pass through grating-1 without mode must likewise pass through being reected and the LP grating-2. Any light reection at these points in the light path causes scattering loss and a decrease in the efciency of our device. Therefore, although the blazed grating in Fig. 4 has strong coupling to cladding modes, it would lead to high insertion loss if used in our device because no clear transmission band is available. This problem can be avoided by writing the grating in a ber that has a properly designed index prole. The W-ber has an inner cladding region that has an index that is less than the core, as depicted in Fig. 5(a). When a blazed grating is written in this type of ber, the coupling to one cladding mode is approximately 20 dB, while most of the other modes have been surpressed, as seen in Fig. 5(b) [18]. The use of this type of grating would allow our three-grating device to have a low insertion loss. In addition to the coupling efciency, we must also consider the bandwidth of the cladding mode resonance. If the signal bandwidth, which typically depends on the bit rate, is larger than the grating bandwidth, then portions of the spectrum will be ltered out, leading to pulse shape distortion. In our device, the bandwidth of unchirped grating-1, similar to the grating in Fig. 5(b), limits the bandwidth of the entire device. These gratings have a bandwidth of around 0.2 nm, and should pass data with a bit rate of 40 Gb/s [19] with no distortion. To accommodate even higher bit rates, we could increase the overall bandwidth of the device by chirping both grating-1 and grating-2. The bandwidth and dispersion of a chirped ber grating is dependent on the slope of the chirp and the length of the grating. The dispersion results from a wavelength-dependent time delay induced by varying the resonant frequency of the grating along the -axis. The slope of the chirp (units of nm/cm) is inversely proportional to the amount of dispersion. Also, since the resonant frequency is being changed over the length of the grating, the grating bandwidth is dependent on the product of the slope and the grating length. Therefore, we can design a grating with a specic dispersion and bandwidth by properly choosing the slope of the chirp and the length of the grating.

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(a)

(b) (a) Fig. 6. (a) Optical signal follows the path shown schematically in Fig. 1. (b) Experimental setup follows the schematic description, with grating-2 chirped by temperature and grating-3 replaced by a mode-selecting spatial lter.

(b) Fig. 5. (a) A W-ber with an inner cladding ( co cl ) that has an index of refraction ( ) that is less than the index of the core. (b) A blazed grating that is written in a W-ber has strong coupling to one cladding mode, while all of the other cladding mode resonances are surpressed.

r <r<r

IV. EXPERIMENT The device concept and experimental setup are shown in Fig. 6(a) and (b), respectively. We generated 30 ps full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) pulses with 1542-nm wavelength using an F-center laser. After propagating 10 km in standard SMF, the pulses were amplied by an erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA) and then passed through the grating section where they propagate through grating-1 and grating-2, as described in Section II. The light is brought out of the ber and passed through a spatial lter to separate out the cladding mode of interest. That signal was then coupled back into a ber, amplied by an EDFA, and measured using a 45-GHz optical detector. The gratings used in our experiment were not blazed, so their efciencies of coupling to cladding modes were approximately 37%. This caused a signicant portion of the light that entered the grating section to pass through unaffected and exit in the LP mode. Therefore, in our experimental setup, we replaced grating-3 [see Fig. 6(a)] with a spatial lter [see Fig. 6(b)] to preferentially select the cladding mode of interest and remove the unwanted LP mode. This mode selection along with the second EDFA in Fig. 3(b) compensated for the low efciency of our gratings. More efcient blazed gratings are available commercially, and this step will become unnecessary in future work. The uniform heating of grating-1, shown in Fig. 6(b), was done in order to tune the cladding mode resonance. This
Fig. 7. A 30 ps pulse (diamonds) is broadened by linear dispersion to 67 ps (squares) and then compressed back to its original width (line) using only ber gratings.

maximized the coupling between the output mode of grating-2 in Fig. 1) and the output mode of grating-1 (LP in (LP Fig. 1). Grating-2 is intrinsically not chirped in that it has a purely periodic index modulation. However, we chirped grating-2 by heating one end of the grating and cooling the other. The open diamond markers in Fig. 7 show the original 30 ps FWHM pulse measured at the point in Fig. 6(b) before the SMF section. After passing through the 10 km of SMF, the pulse was broadened by GVD to a width of 67 ps FWHM (square markers in Fig. 7). Passing through the grating section, by reecting rst off of chirped grating-2 and then grating1, the pulse was recompressed (solid curve in Fig. 7). By properly tuning the resonance wavelengths of the gratings as well as the chirp of grating-2, we compensated for the dispersion induced by transmission through 10 km of SMF and brought the pulse back to its original 30 ps FWHM.

V. DISCUSSION Heating a silica ber uniformly creates a uniform shift in the index of refraction. When this occurs across the length

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of a grating, the average index of refraction decreases and the grating resonances shift equally to longer wavelength in proportion to the change in index. Similarly, if a temperature gradient in the -direction is created along the length of a grating, the index has a -dependence. Therefore, the resonant wavelength depends on , and this results in different time delays for different wavelengths. This time delay is used to compensate for the pulse dispersion induced by GVD in an optical ber. The temperature tuning described above was necessary in our experiment to maximize the output power from the gratings and properly compensate for the GVD imposed on the pulse. However, the output signal was still too weak to detect, so it was amplied by an EDFA. This amplication introduced timing jitter and noise into the compressed pulse that prohibited averaging of the data and made the compressed pulse noisier than the original pulse. Proper design of the gratings can eliminate the need for temperature tuning and optical amplication and allow this method of dispersion compensation to be applied to many optical communication systems. The bandwidth of the gratings used in our experiment were 27 GHz, which supports a transform limited pulse width of 16 ps. Therefore, these gratings could be used in a system that has a bit rate up to approximately 24 Gb/s. This bit rate can be increased by varying the grating length or the slope of the chirp, as discussed in Section III. Our technique is also applicable to WDM systems. Gratings are currently available that have only one resonance that couples to a cladding mode [20]. Such gratings would allow our device to select only one channel out of many in a WDM system. Therefore, one device for each channel can be placed in series and only the desired channel will interact with its corresponding grating compensator and the remainder will be unaffected. Alternatively, because the spacing between gratings is not important, gratings-1 and 2 could be composed of multiple gratings that would then compensate a wide band of WDM channels with the same device. VI. CONCLUSION We combined a chirped ber grating with a cladding mode coupling grating to perform dispersion compensation without the use of an optical circulator, while maintaining the forward propagation direction. This device would be inexpensive to fabricate and readily added to an existing system for upgrade to a higher data rate or longer transmission distance. In the future, we will use blazed gratings to increase the efciency and selectivity of the cladding mode coupling. We will also use commercially available chirped gratings to increase the amount of attainable dispersion compensation. REFERENCES
[1] D. Breuer, K. Jurgensen, F. Kuppers, A. Mattheus, I. Gabitov, and S. K. Turisyn, Optimal schemes for dispersion compensation of standard monomode ber based links, Opt. Commun., vol. 140, pp. 1518, 1997. [2] D. Le Guen, A. OHare, S. Del Burgo, D. Grot, F. Favre, and T. Georges, Narrowband 640 Gb/s soliton DWDM transmission over 1200 km of standard ber with 100 km 21 dB amplier spans, Electron. Lett., vol. 24, pp. 23452346, 1998.

[3] R. M. Jopson, A. H. Gnauck, and R. M. Derosier, Compensation of ber chromatic dispersion by spectral inversion, Electron. Lett., vol. 29, pp. 576578, 1993. [4] S. Wanatabe, T. Naito, and T. Chikama, Compensation of chromatic dispersion in a single-mode ber by optical phase conjugation, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 5, pp. 9295, 1993. [5] R. Kashyap, H. G. Froehlich, A. Swanton, and D. J. Armes, 1.3 m long super-step-chirped ber Bragg grating with a continuous delay of 13.5 ns and a bandwidth of 10 nm for broadband dispersion compensation, Electron. Lett., vol. 32, pp. 18071809, 1996. [6] K. O. Hill, S. Theriault, B. Malo, F. Bilodeau, T. Kitagawa, D. C. Johnson, J. Albert, K. Takiguchi, T. Kataoka, and K. Hagimoto, Chirped in-ber Bragg grating dispersion compensator: Linearization of dispersion characteristic and demonstration of dispersion compensation in 100 km, 10 Gb/s optical ber link, Electron. Lett., vol. 30, pp. 17551756, 1994. [7] M. J. Cole, H. Greiger, R. I. Lammings, S. Y. Set, M. N. Zervas, W. H. Loh, and V. Gusmeroli, Broadband dispersion compensating chirped ber Bragg gratings in a 10 Gb/s NRZ 110 km nondispersion shifted ber link operating at 1.55 m, Electron. Lett., vol. 33, pp. 7071, 1997. [8] W. H. Loh, R. I. Lamming, N. Robinson, A. Cavaciuti, F. Vaninetti, C. J. Anderson, M. N. Zervas, and M. J. Cole, Dispersion compensation over distances in excess of 500 km for 10 Gb/s systems using chirped ber gratings, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 8, pp. 944946, 1996. [9] W. H. Loh, R. I. Laming, A. D. Ellis, and D. Atkinson, 10 Gb/s transmission over 700 km of standard single-mode ber with 10-cm chirped grating compensator and duobinary transmitter, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 8, pp. 12581260, 1996. [10] N. H. Ky, H. G. Limberger, R. P. Salathe, and F. Cochet, Efcient broadband intracore grating LP01 LP02 mode converters for chromaticdispersion compensation, Opt. Lett., vol. 23, pp. 445446, 1998. [11] B. Gisin, N. Gisin, and F. Cochet, Transmission gratings for chromatic dispersion compensation, Opt. Lett., vol. 21, pp. 686688, 1996. [12] M. Douay, W. Xie, T. Taunay, P. Bernage, P. Niay, P. Cordier et al., Densication involved in the UV-based photosensitivity of silica glasses and optical bers, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 15, pp. 13291342, 1997. [13] A. M. Vengsarkar et al., Long-period ber gratings as band-rejection lters, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 14, p. 58, 1996. [14] M. Douay, W. Xie, T. Taunay, P. Bernage, P. Niay, P. Cordier et al., Densication involved in the UV-based photosensitivity of silica glasses and optical bers, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 15, pp. 13291342, 1997. [15] T. Erdogan, Tilted ber phase gratings, J. Opt. Soc. Amer. A., vol. 13, pp. 296309, 1997. [16] , Fiber grating spectra, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 15, pp. 12771294, 1997. [17] S. J. Hewlett, J. D. Love, G. Meltz, T. J. Bailey, and W. W. Morey, Cladding-mode coupling characteristics of Bragg gratings in depressedcladding ber, Electron. Lett., vol. 31, pp. 820822, 1995. [18] C. W. Haggans, H. Singh, W. F. Varner, Y. Li, and M. Zippin, Narrow-band rejection lters with negligible backreection using tilted photoinduced gratings in single-mode bers, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 10, pp. 690692, 1998. [19] G. P. Agrawal, Fiber-Optic Communication Systems. New York: Wiley, 1992, p. 52. [20] C. W. Haggans, H. Singh, W. F. Varner, Y. Li, and M. Zippin, Narrow-band rejection lters with negligible backreection using tilted photoinduced gratings in single-mode bers, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 10, pp. 690692, 1998.

Paul Petruzzi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 1996. He is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the University of Maryland, College Park. His research includes ber Bragg grating applications and polarization properties of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs).

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Curt Lowry received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree in optical sciences from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1993. He joined the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, in 1993, and has applied nonlinearities in optical bers and semiconductors to develop methods for signal header recognition, optical dispersion compensation, and high-speed switching for optical networks. He is the author or coauthor of ten journal papers and 14 conference papers, and holds one patent.

Ponniah Sivanesan received the B.S. degree in physics from the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in 1989, and the M.S. degree in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997. He is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at the Smart Materials and Structures Research Center, the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include ber Bragg grating applications in sensors and ber lasers. Mr. Sivanesan is a student member of the Optical Society of America (OSA).