Abstract

The use of a dual frequency optical beat signal for generation of pulse trains in the gigahertz repetition rate range has been recently proposed and experimentally demonstrated.^1-4 The beat signal in the time domain has a sinusoidal shape envelope with a period determined by the frequency separation between the two modes. The key idea of the technique is to reshape the periods of the teat signal into a pulse train with the same repetition rate as the beat frequency. The reshaping can be achieved using nonlinear propagation in an optical fiber where the adiabatic trapping of the sinusoidal beat signal into a soliton pulse train occurs in the fiber due to "slow" amplification or dispersion decreasing along the fiber length,^1-3 The reshaping can be also realized by exploiting the soliton Raman self-scattering effect.⁴ Soliton pulse trains at repetition rates up to 100 GHz have been experimentally generated by these methods.^2-4

© 1993 Optical Society of America