Tunable dispersion compensator based on uniform fiber Bragg grating and its application to tunable pulse repetition-rate multiplication

A new technique to control the chromatic dispersion of a uniform fiber Bragg grating based on the symmetrical bending is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The specially designed two translation stages with gears and a sawtooth wheel can simultaneously induce the tension and compression strain corresponding to the bending direction. The tension and compression strain can effectively control the chirp ratio along the fiber grating attached on a flexible cantilever beam and consequently the dispersion value without the center wavelength shift. We successfully achieve the wide tuning range of chromatic dispersion without the center wavelength shift, which is less than 0.02 nm. We also reduce the group delay ripple as low as similar to +/- 5 ps. And we also demonstrate the application of the proposed tunable dispersion compensation technique to the tunable pulse repetition- rate multiplication and obtain high- quality pulses at repetition rates of 20 similar to 40 GHz. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.