Compression of periodic optical pulses using temporal fractional Talbot effect

Abstract

Recently, a novel method for compression of periodic optical pulses based on a superposition of replicated and time-de- layed original pulse trains was proposed. In this paper, we experi- mentally demonstrate that the phase shift of these replicas, as oc- curs in the temporal fractional Talbot effect, leads to compression without repetition-rate multiplication, which is inherent in the pre- vious method. Simple and compact devices based on fiber Bragg gratings or fiber/or waveguide splitters/combiners, used for imple- mentation of the present method can be considered as an equiva- lent of dispersive delay lines for periodic optical pulses. The pro- posed devices will also be available, for instance, for pulse gener- ation, pulse-chirp compensation, temporal imaging, and real-time spectrum analysis for periodic optical pulses. Index Terms—Dispersive delay line (DDL), fiber Bragg gratings (FBG), fiber/waveguide splitters/combiners, optical-pulse com- pression, optical-pulse replication, temporal Talbot effect.