High energy, sub-picosecond pulse compression at 10 GHz using a fibre/fibre-grating pulse compressor

The authors report a fibre/fibre-grating pulse compressor suitable for compressing high energy, high repetition rate picosecond pulses to sub-picosecond durations. Linearly chirped fibre gratings and an optical circulator are used for output chirp compensation. This scheme is not limited to wavelength regimes with anomalous dispersion in the fibre. A 10 GHz train of 7.1 ps pulses at 1548 nm was compressed to 720 fs, corresponding to a compression factor of /spl sim/10. At maximum power, the compressed pulses had 18 pJ energies and peak powers of 15 W.