Picosecond soliton transmission by use of concatenated gain-distributed nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirrors.

Stable picosecond soliton transmission is demonstrated numerically by use of concatenated gain-distributed nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirrors (NALMs). We show that, as compared with previous soliton transmission schemes that use conventional NALMs or nonlinear optical loop mirror and amplifier combinations, the present scheme permits a significant increase of loop-mirror (amplifier) spacing. The broad switching window of the present device and the high-quality pulses switched from it provide a reasonable stability range for soliton transmission. We also show that a soliton self-frequency shift can be suppressed by the gain-dispersion effect in the amplifying fiber loop and that soliton-soliton interactions can be partially reduced by using lowly dispersive transmission fibers.

Amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons in an erbium-doped nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirror.

A nonlinear amplifying loop mirror constructed from erbium-doped fiber is proposed for simultaneous amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons. Numerical simulations show that, unlike conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in which nonlinear effects lead to serious degradation of pulse quality, the proposed device performs efficient high-quality amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons while it almost completely preserves the soliton nature of the input pulses. Moreover, the performance of the device is insensitive to small variations in the loop length and in the power-splitting ratio of the coupler.