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Broadband Dispersion Compensation for High-Bit-Rate Fiber Transmission

C. D. Poole, J. M. Wiesenfeld, A. R. McCormick, K. T. Nelson, Holmdel, N.J.

The application of erbium-doped fiber optical amplifiers in lightwave communication systems has made it possible to transmit lightwaves over thousands of kilometers of single-mode fiber without electronic regeneration. With fiber loss no longer a factor, the primary limitation to high-bit-rate transmission over presently installed fiber networks is group-velocity dispersion, a property of single-mode fiber that causes different spectral components of an optical pulse to propagate with different group velocities. As a result, there has been considerable interest in finding an optical device that can compensate group velocity dispersion by inducing a dispersion equal in magnitude but opposite in sign to the dispersion of single-mode fiber.

Publish Date: 01 December 1992