High Frequency Bright and Dark Soliton Sources Based on Dispersion Profiled Fibre Circuitry and Their Applications

There has been considerable recent interest in the development of all-optical techniques for the generation of high frequency soliton trains based on nonlinear beat signal to soliton train conversion in dispersion profiled fibre circuits (see e.g. Refs.[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]). These schemes offer advantages of ultra-high repetition rates, high pulse quality, and broad wavelength and repetition rate tunability. Moreover, it is a non-resonant technique offering increased environmental stability relative to other more conventional fibre based short pulse generation schemes. However, although impressive source demonstrations have been made, their practical applications to date have been limited, due primarily to issues relating to timing jitter [4, 5], Brillouin scattering [3, 4] and difficulties in applying the techniques to repetition rate ranges <40 GHz to allow compatibility with state of the art, high data rate electronic signals [1]. In this paper we report on the development and performance of a diode-driven, ultra-low jitter, 30–40 GHz soliton transmitter with potential for telecommunication applications [5, 6]. The results illustrate that synchronisation, modulation and electrical detection issues specific to the use of such high frequency pulse sources can be overcome to give stable, error free operation.