Abstract

Highly repetitive ultrashort optical pulse generation has the potential for future applications in optical sampling, optoelectronic processing, etc., as well as for wideband communication systems. To date, a femtosecond optical pulse compression technique has been reported¹ employing selfphase modulation in fibers. This approach, however, requires high-power mode-locked lasers, resulting in limitations on repetition rate, power consumption, and device compactness. Laser diodes (LD), therefore, should be promising owing to their high-speed response and easy handling. Previously we clarified^2,3 that frequency chirping intrinsically associated with carrier density fluctuation in LDs can be made linearly red-shifted and be compensated for by traveling through dispersion-shifted fibers. In this paper, optical pulses with a 4.4- GHz repetition rate are successfully compressed to a nearly transform-limited value of 6 ps.

© 1986 Optical Society of America