Abstract

It is very difficult to measure small amounts of chirp on optical pulses close to their transform limit. Inferring chirp from time bandwidth products is too dependent on pulse shape for reliable measurements. Since simulations predict that even a 10% increase in bandwidth due to chirp affects the performance of unfiltered soliton systems, it is important to be able to measure the chirp of soliton sources with high sensitivity. Time resolved spectrometry [1], often used to measure the chirp on semiconductor lasers, can not measure close enough to the transform limit. Phase retrieval methods [2], which reconstruct pulses from the optical spectrum, work well for femtosecond pulses but not for long pulses with narrow bandwidths.

© 1994 Optical Society of America