Optical Pulse Compression Schemes that Use Nonlinear Bragg Gratings

Nonlinear optical pulse compression of picosecond pulses typically requires long lengths of optical fiber and multiple components Periodic structures, such as fiber Bragg gratings, are highly dispersive, at wavelengths outside of the photonic bandgap. This implies that such gratings can be used as very short all-fiber compressors. In this paper, we review a number of such compression schemes involving uniform and nonuniform fiber Bragg gratings, and rely on both soliton and nonsoliton compression principles. We also show an extension of one of the compression schemes, which allows the generation of adjustable high-repetition rate soliton trains.