Early optical soliton research at Imperial College London

Abstract

The early work of the Femtosecond Optics Group at Imperial College on optical soliton generation in fibres is reviewed that commenced with studies of ultrashort pulse generation using high order soliton compression for the production of pulses of 18 fs. Also described are seminal studies of soliton Raman generation using long pulse pumping where evolution from modulational instability led to continuum generation and tunable femtosecond generation. Early investigations of seeding modulational instability for enhanced soliton generation and spectral extension are described, as is the work on seeding of noise, soliton generation from noise bursts and soliton generation from amplified noise bursts. The first study of femtosecond soliton amplification in Er fibre amplifiers is described as well as synchronous Raman amplification of solitons. Various schemes reviewing our investigations of adiabatic soliton compression and amplification are included for the generation of pulsewidth and wavelength tunable soliton sources in fully fibre integrated geometries.