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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 25, NO.

1, JANUARY 2007

165

Generation of 80-nm Wavelength-Tunable 100-fs Pulse Based on Comblike Proled Fiber Comprised of HNLF and Zero Dispersion-Slope NZDSF
Takashi Inoue, Member, IEEE, Naomi Kumano, Masanori Takahashi, Takeshi Yagi, and Misao Sakano
AbstractTo realize extremely wideband wavelength-tunable femtosecond (fs) pulse generation, we propose a dispersionattened comblike proled ber that is a pulse compressor comprised of low dispersion-slope highly nonlinear ber and zero dispersion-slope nonzero dispersion-shifted ber (ZDS-NZDSF). We also apply ZDS-NZDSF to a soliton converter to reshape and compress a seed pulse train generated from a tunable laser source and an intensity modulator. Using the proposed scheme, we successfully generate 100-fs optical pulse from the seed pulse with the varied wavelengths of 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. Index TermsComblike proled ber (CPF), highly nonlinear ber (HNLF), nonlinear effect, optical pulse compression, zero dispersion-slope nonzero dispersion-shifted ber (ZDS-NZDSF).

Fig. 1. Schematic of the dispersion characteristics of a DF-DDF at the input and output ends.

I. I NTRODUCTION ENERATION of femtosecond (fs) optical pulse is an important technique, and it has attracted great interests of researchers, because an fs-pulse is useful for various purposes in scientic and engineering elds. A practical way to generate an fs-pulse is to compress a seed pulse by using nonlinear and dispersion effects of optical bers [1]. Compared with modelocked ber lasers, an fs-pulse source comprised of a seedpulse generator and a ber-based pulse compressor has various advantages: It operates with a high stability and it has exibility for the repetition rate and the operating wavelength (the carrier wavelength of the input pulse). Although the tunability of the operating wavelength is an important feature of a light source, the tunable range largely depends on the characteristics of a compression ber. Especially, the dispersion-slope, or the third-order dispersion, is a dominant factor for the tunable range, because the compression characteristics are determined by the dispersion and the nonlinearity of a compression ber, and in general, the nonlinearity is relatively insensitive to the wavelength compared with the dispersion. Therefore, reducing the dispersion-slope is effective to enlarge the tunable range for wavelength-tunable pulse compression. It has been reported that a dispersion-attened dispersiondecreasing ber (DF-DDF) is applicable to the generation of an fs-pulse with a wide tunable range of the operating wavelength [2]. In fact, it was demonstrated in [2] that the width of a
Manuscript received June 30, 2006; revised October 26, 2006. T. Inoue, N. Kumano, M. Takahashi, and T. Yagi are with the Fitel Photonics Laboratory, Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba 290-8555, Japan (e-mail: inoue.takashi@furukawa.co.jp). M. Sakano is with the Yokohama R&D Laboratories, Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba 290-8555, Japan. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JLT.2006.888165

picosecond (ps) pulse was compressed to 180 fs with the tunable range of 30 nm (15331565 nm) in a DF-DDF. DF-DDF has positive (anomalous) dispersion at the input end and has nearly zero dispersion-slope in the vicinity of the operating wavelength. The dispersion decreases along the longitudinal distance of the ber, and the dispersion at the output end becomes small but still positive. Such a prole enables adiabaticsoliton compression, and the atness of the dispersion against the wavelength contributes to a compression process insensitive to the operating wavelength. Fig. 1 shows a schematic of the wavelength-dispersion characteristics at the input and output ends of a DF-DDF, where c is the operating wavelength, and Di and Do are the dispersion at = c for the input and output ends of the ber, respectively. A problem in using adiabatic-soliton compression in a DF-DDF for wavelength-tunable fs pulse generation is that there are limits with respect to the tunable range and/or the width of a compressed pulse due to the residual dispersion-slope and the fourth-order dispersion (FOD) of the ber. Note here that similar to usual bers, the DF-DDF has a negative FOD d2 D/d2 < 0, and the dispersion is convex upward against the wavelength, as shown in Fig. 1. When we consider compressing the width of a pulse much shorter, we should decrease the dispersion at the output end Do , since the width of the output pulse is proportional to Do in an adiabaticsoliton-compression scheme. On the other hand, the smaller the output dispersion Do becomes, the more likely it varies with the operating wavelength due to the dispersion-slope or the FOD, and the same compression feature can be no longer obtained for all the varied wavelengths. Therefore, and/or the lower limit of are limited to certain values. In addition, for adiabaticsoliton compression, the dispersion of the ber must be positive in the spectral region that covers the entire spectrum of the compressed pulse. This also limits and . We consider here applying comblike proled ber (CPF) [3][6] to widely wavelength-tunable fs pulse generation.

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 25, NO. 1, JANUARY 2007

CPF originally consists of alternate concatenations of a low dispersion-slope highly nonlinear ber (HNLF) [7], [8] and a single-mode ber (SMF), and it has realized C- and L-band (15301610 nm) wavelength-tunable ps pulse generation [5], or 100-fs pulse-train generation from 1-THz beat signal at the xed wavelength of 1552 nm [6]. In CPF, a pulse goes through the nonlinear effect in HNLF and the dispersion effect in SMF separately, and we can control the compression characteristics by adjusting the length of each ber. In other words, the local value of dispersion in CPF is not required to be decreased along the longitudinal distance as in DDF but constant throughout the ber. Consequently, an operation of wavelength-tunable pulse compression is less subject to the dispersion-slope and the FOD of the bers [4]. However, if we attempt an fs-pulse compression with wavelength tunability covering the CL-bandwavelength region using a conventional CPF, the dispersionslope of SMF would affect the compression characteristics, because the dispersion prole of the total CPF varies with the operating wavelength, and it may not be neglected for fs-pulse propagation. We then propose to employ zero dispersionslope nonzero dispersion-shifted ber (ZDS-NZDSF) [9] instead of SMF as the dispersive medium in CPF. We note that ZDS-NZDSF was originally developed as a transmission ber and that it has almost at anomalous dispersion against the wavelength. In this paper, we demonstrate an 80-nm wavelength-tunable 100-fs pulse generation using a DF-CPF pulse compressor comprised of low dispersion-slope HNLF and ZDS-NZDSF. The seed pulse is 40-GHz repeating, 8.5-ps-width pulse train obtained from a tunable laser source (TLS) and a lithium-niobate (LN) intensity modulator. We also apply ZDS-NZDSF to soliton converter, which reshapes and compresses the waveform of the seed pulse to approximately 4-ps-width chirp-free sechlike waveform. We design and fabricate a ve-step DF-CPF to compress the 4-ps-width pulse obtained from the soliton converter and successfully generate the output pulse having the width of approximately 100 fs for the input wavelengths of c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. II. D ESIGN OF P ULSE C OMPRESSOR FOR FS P ULSE G ENERATION In this section, we show the design of an optical-pulse compressor, which realizes 80-nm wavelength-tunable 100-fs pulse generation from a seed pulse. As a seed pulse, we assume to use a 40-GHz repeating 8.5-ps-full-width at half maximum (FWHM) pulse train generated from a TLS through an LN modulator (LNM), with the central wavelength c varied from 1530 to 1610 nm. A pulse compressor to generate a 100-fs pulse from the seed pulse consists of two stages: The rst stage is a soliton converter that reshapes and compresses the seed pulse to a 4-ps-FWHM chirp-free sechlike pulse and the second is a DF-CPF, which compresses the width from 4 ps to 100 fs. We apply here ZDSNZDSF to the soliton converter as well as the DF-CPF. Fig. 2 shows the wavelength-dispersion characteristics of three NZDSFs and SMF, where the NZDSFs have at anomalous dispersion against the wavelength, while SMF has a rela-

Fig. 2.

Dispersion characteristics of three ZDS-NZDSFs and SMF.

Fig. 3.

Dispersion and nonlinearity proles of the designed ve-step DF-CPF.

Fig. 4.

Experimental setup.

tively large slope. The effective area of the NZDSFs is Ae 45 m2 [9], and the nonlinearity at the wavelength of 1.55 m is estimated to be 2.3 W1 km1 from the comparison of the Ae with SMF. We have found that the 1.8-km-long NZDSF#1, shown in Fig. 2, works as a soliton converter for the seed pulse when the input averaged power Pin = 19.5 dBm, and it is expected that the converted pulse has the 4-ps-FWHM transform-limited sechlike waveform. Second, we design a ve-step DF-CPF to compress the 4-psFWHM of the output pulse of the soliton converter to 100 fs considering that the compression process is optimized for c = 1570 nm. We note that a step of the CPF consists of an HNLF and a ZDS-NZDSF. As a guideline for the design of the DFCPF, we attempt to compress the width of the pulse by a factor of 1/2 or less for each step of the CPF, and we choose the length of each HNLF so that the peak nonlinear phase shift of the pulse NL = P L is 2.2 rad, where P represents the peak power of the pulse, and L is the ber length. We note that such

INOUE et al.: GENERATION OF 80-nm WAVELENGTH-TUNABLE 100-fs PULSE BASED ON CPF

167

Fig. 5.

Autocorrelation traces (upper) and optical spectra (lower) of the seed-pulse train for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm.

a highly efcient conventional CPF has already been realized in the previous work [5]. Meanwhile, we set the length of each NZDSF so that the frequency chirp of the pulse that is generated in the HNLF located just before an NZDSF is suitably compensated through the anomalous-dispersion effect and that the pulsewidth is compressed to the minimum. In general, a large dispersion is preferable for anomalous-dispersion ber to realize effective-chirp compensation with a short-length conguration. However, when the pulse is compressed in femtosecond region, the length required for chirp compensation tends to be a few meters, and a relatively small dispersion is then desired for ne adjustment of the ber length. Fig. 3 depicts the comblike proles for the dispersion at 1570 nm and the nonlinearity of the designed DF-CPF. We employed the ZDS-NZDSF#2, shown in Fig. 2, for the rst two steps of the CPF and the ZDS-NZDSF#3, having a relatively small dispersion, for the last three steps. In addition to at dispersion of the NZDSFs, all of HNLFs used here have small dispersion-slope of less than 0.0036 ps/nm2 /km, so it is expected that the compression process in the CPF is basically insensitive to c . III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS We conduct an experiment on 100-fs pulse generation with 80-nm wavelength-tunability. Fig. 4 shows the experimental setup. The rst half is the seed-pulse generating part, and the second is the pulse-compressing part based on the soliton converter and the DF-CPF designed in the previous section. The seed-pulse generating part consists of a TLS, an LNM driven by a 40-GHz electrical clock, an erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA), a bandpass lter, a polarization controller (PC), and a variable optical attenuator (VOA). The TLS emits a continuous wave having any of the wavelengths of c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm, and the coherence-control function is activated for suppressing the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in the pulse-compressing part. We use an EDFA for the C-band signal in the case of c = 1530 nm and one for L-band in c =

Fig. 6. Experimentally obtained FWHM and TBP of the output pulse of the soliton converter for varied averaged input power Pin . The triangles, the circles, and the squares represent the data for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm, respectively.

1570 and 1610 nm. We note that the PC and the VOA are used for adjusting the polarization state and the input averaged power Pin of the seed pulse, respectively. Fig. 5 shows the measured autocorrelation traces and the optical spectra of the seed pulses for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. We adjust here the bias voltage applied to the LNM for each c so that the FWHM of the seed pulse, which is obtained from the sech tting of the autocorrelation trace, becomes 8.5 ps. Meanwhile, the pulse-compressing part is comprised of a soliton converter (1.8-km NZDSF#1), an isolator for suppressing SBS, and a ve-step DF-CPF with the design of Fig. 3. The measured total insertion loss of the whole compressing part is 5.3 dB for c = 1530 and 1570 nm and 5.9 dB for 1610 nm. In the following, we study the characteristics of the soliton converter and, then, we show the waveforms of the output pulses of the soliton converter and the DF-CPF. Fig. 6 shows the experimentally obtained FWHM and the time-bandwidth product (TBP) of the output pulses of the soliton converter for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm when we vary the input averaged power Pin from 19.5 to 21.5 dBm. One can see in Fig. 6 that the FWHM is reduced for the increased

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 25, NO. 1, JANUARY 2007

Fig. 7. Autocorrelation traces (upper) and optical spectra (lower) measured at the output of the 1.8-km NZDSF#1 (soliton converter) for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. The dotted curves in both the autocorrelation traces and the spectra represent sech-tting functions.

Fig. 8. Autocorrelation traces (upper) and optical spectra (lower) measured at the output of the ve-step DF-CPF for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. The dotted curves in the autocorrelation traces represent Gaussian-tting functions.

input powers while the TBP is almost constant in the vicinity of 0.3 for any wavelengths. In addition, for the same input power, the FWHM is larger for longer wavelength, which reects the slight positive dispersion-slope of NZDSF#1, as shown in Fig. 2. These results are qualitatively consistent with the fact that the width of the fundamental soliton is proportional to (D/P )1/2 , where D and are the dispersion and the nonlinearity of the ber, respectively, and P is the peak power of the pulse. Fig. 7 depicts the waveforms of the output pulses of the soliton converter when the input power Pin = 20.0, 19.5, and 21.0 dBm for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm, respectively. We note that the input powers used here are employed to minimize the width of the output pulse of the following DF-CPF. In Fig. 7, both the autocorrelation traces and the spectra are well tted by sech functions, the FWHM are 3.3, 4.0, and 3.7 ps, and the TBP are 0.300, 0.301, and 0.297 for c = 1530, 1570, and

1610 nm, respectively. Thus, we have veried that the 1.8-kmlong NZDSF#1 successfully works as a soliton converter and that we can control the output width of the converter by adjusting the input power for each wavelength. We then observed the waveform of the output pulse of the ve-step DF-CPF for each c and show the autocorrelation trace and the spectrum in Fig. 8. We set the input optical power Pin = 20.0, 19.5, and 21.0 dBm for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm, respectively, so that the output width is minimized for each wavelength. The autocorrelation traces are tted by Gaussian functions, and the FWHM are estimated to be 108, 97, and 104 fs for c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm, respectively. Thus, we successfully generated approximately 100-fs pulses with 80-nm wavelength-tunable range by using the proposed pulse-compression scheme. In addition, the contrast between the discrete spectral lines and the continuous-noise components

INOUE et al.: GENERATION OF 80-nm WAVELENGTH-TUNABLE 100-fs PULSE BASED ON CPF

169

in the spectrum shown in Fig. 8 is very clear in wide wavelength range for all cases of c . Thus, thanks to highly efcient design of the DF-CPF, the gain of parametric-noise amplication is sufciently suppressed [5] compared with the case of higher order soliton propagation [10]. Although considerable amount of the pedestal component can be observed in the autocorrelation traces in Fig. 8, they could be suppressed if we designed the CPF with much more step numbers. Note, however, that a large step number of a DF-CPF would result in a large insertion loss, and a CPF with several tens of the steps as presented in [11] is not practical in the case of DF-CPF proposed here. For example, if the insertion loss were limited to 10 dB, the maximum step number could then be ten or so. IV. C ONCLUSION In this paper, we proposed and demonstrated extremely wideband wavelength-tunable fs pulse generation applying ZDS-NZDSF to a soliton converter and a CPF pulse compressor. From a 40-GHz repeating 8.5-ps-FWHM seed-pulse train, approximately, a 100-fs-FWHM pulse train was successfully generated for each of the wavelengths of c = 1530, 1570, and 1610 nm. To the best of our knowledge, such a wide tunability in fs pulse generation has never been presented, and we believe that ZDS-NZDSF incorporated in CPF technology enabled this achievement. Combinations of low dispersion-slope HNLF and ZDS-NZDSF is effective to realize ultrabroadband nonlinear processes by applying anomalousdispersion effect. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank R. Sugizaki, J. Hiroishi, and M. Tadakuma for their support of preparing optical bers, and they would also like to thank S. Matsushita and Y. Ozeki for fruitful discussions. R EFERENCES
[1] G. P. Agrawal, Applications of Nonlinear Fiber Optics. New York: Academic, 2001, ch. 6. [2] K. R. Tamura and M. Nakazawa, Femtosecond soliton generation over a 32-nm wavelength range using a dispersion-attened dispersiondecreasing ber, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 319 321, Mar. 1999. [3] K. Igarashi, J. Hiroishi, T. Yagi, and S. Namiki, Comb-like proled bre for efcient generation of high quality 160 GHz sub-picosecond soliton train, Electron. Lett., vol. 41, no. 12, pp. 688690, Jun. 2005. [4] K. Igarashi, H. Tobioka, M. Takahashi, T. Yagi, and S. Namiki, Widely wavelength-tunable 40 GHz femtosecond pulse source based on compression of externally-modulated pulse using 1.4 km comb-like proled bre, Electron. Lett., vol. 41, no. 14, pp. 797798, Jul. 2005. [5] T. Inoue, H. Tobioka, K. Igarashi, and S. Namiki, Optical pulse compression based on stationary rescaled pulse propagation in comb-like proled ber, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 25102522, Jul. 2006. [6] Y. Ozeki, S. Takasaka, J. Hiroishi, R. Sugizaki, T. Yagi, M. Sakano, and S. Namiki, Generation of 1 THz repetition rate, 97 fs optical pulse train based on comb-like proled bre, Electron. Lett., vol. 41, no. 19, pp. 10481050, Sep. 2005. [7] J. Hiroishi, N. Kumano, K. Mukasa, R. Sugizaki, R. Miyabe, S.-I. Matsushita, H. Tobioka, S. Namiki, and T. Yagi, Dispersion slope controlled HNL-DSF with high of 25 W1 km1 and band conversion experiment using this ber, presented at the Eur. Conf. Optical Commun., Copenhagen, Denmark, 2002, Paper PD1.5.

[8] M. Takahashi, R. Sugizaki, J. Hiroishi, M. Tadakuma, Y. Taniguchi, and T. Yagi, Low-loss and low-dispersion-slope highly nonlinear bers, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 36153624, Nov. 2005. [9] N. Kumano, K. Mukasa, S. Matsushita, and T. Yagi, Zero dispersionslope NZ-DSF with ultra wide bandwidth over 300 nm, presented at the Eur. Conf. Optical Commun., Copenhagen, Denmark, 2002, Paper PD1.4. [10] M. Nakazawa, H. Kubota, and K. Tamura, Random evolution and coherence degradation of a high-order optical soliton train in the presence of noise, Opt. Lett., vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 318320, Mar. 1999. [11] Y. Ozeki, S. Takasaka, T. Inoue, K. Igarashi, J. Hiroishi, R. Sugizaki, M. Sakano, and S. Namiki, Nearly exact optical beat-to-soliton train conversion based on comb-like proled ber emulating a polynomial dispersion decreasing prole, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 17, no. 8, pp. 16981700, Aug. 2005.

Takashi Inoue (S00A02M03) received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1998, 1999, and 2002, respectively, all in communications engineering. He joined Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba, Japan, in 2002, where he has studied optical-signal processing devices based on nonlinear ber optics for ultrahigh-speed optical-ber-communication systems. Dr. Inoue is a member of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society.

Naomi Kumano received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, in 1998 and 2000, respectively. In 2000, she joined Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba, Japan, where she has been engaged in research and development of optical bers and is currently a Research Engineer of Fitel Photonics Laboratory.

Masanori Takahashi received the B.S. degree from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2001. In 2001, he joined Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba, Japan, where he is currently engaged in research and development of ber optics.

Takeshi Yagi received the B.E., M.S., and Dr. Eng. degrees from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 1985, 1987, and 1990, respectively. In 1990, he joined the Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba, Japan, where he has been engaged in research and development of optical bers and is currently the Manager of Fitel Photonics Laboratory. Dr. Yagi is a member of the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers and the Ceramic Society of Japan.

Misao Sakano received the B.E., M.S., and Dr. Eng. degrees from the University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, in 1983, 1985, and 1988, respectively. In 1988, he joined the Furukawa Electric Company, Ltd., Chiba, Japan, where he has been engaged in research and development of ber optics as optical amplier and ber nonlinear device and is currently the Manager of the Yokohama R&D Laboratories.

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