Widely tunable femtosecond soliton pulse generation at a 10-GHz repetition rate by use of the soliton self-frequency shift in photonic crystal fiber

We demonstrate a soliton self-frequency shift of similar to120 nm in a fiber with 1.56-mum pulses generated at a 10-GHz repetition rate by an actively mode-locked laser. A highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with a length of only 12.6 m and a nonlinear coefficient of 62 W(-1)km(-1) is used to achieve such broadband operation. The wavelengths of the resulting sub-300-fs solitons can be tuned effectively by adjusting the input power. The maximum output power of the solitons exceeds 200 mW. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.