Abstract
For both their fundamental and applied interests, optical dark solitons have attracted growing attention in recent years. In view of their potential application to fiber-based communication systems, several techniques were proposed for the generation of continuous-wave (cw) odd-symmetry dark soliton pulse trains. Two of these techniques are based on the direct modulation of a cw laser beam by a Mach-Zehnder interferometer [1] or a phase-modulated fiber loop mirror [2]. These methods suffer the limitation of the typical electronic bandwidths and are therefore adapted to repetition-rates in the GHz range. Other approaches involve the adiabatic transformation of a dual-frequency signal in a dispersion decreasing fiber with normal dispersion [3], and the passive Fourier filtering of standard mode-locked bright pulse trains [4]. Thanks to the absence of electrooptic components, the last two techniques are suitable for ultra-high repetition rates. However, because of important technical obstacles, they were demonstrated only with multi-Gigahertz repetition rates. In this work we analyze and demonstrate a new passive technique for cw dark soliton train generation, which is based on the phenomenon of modulational instability (MI) and therefore naturally leads to THz repetition rates.
© 1998 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
E. Seve, G. Millot, and S. Wabnitz
QWC73 European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC) 1998
Joshua E. Rothenberg and Harley K. Heinrich
MR4 OSA Annual Meeting (FIO) 1991
J. A. R. Williams, K. M. Allen, N. J. Doran, and Ph. Emplit
QThO3 European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC) 1994