Amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons in an erbium-doped nonlinear amplifying fiber loop mirror

A nonlinear amplifying loop mirror constructed from erbium-doped fiber is proposed for simultaneous amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons. Numerical simulations show that, unlike conventional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in which nonlinear effects lead to serious degradation of pulse quality, the proposed device performs efficient high-quality amplification and compression of ultrashort fundamental solitons while it almost completely preserves the soliton nature of the input pulses. Moreover, the performance of the device is insensitive to small variations in the loop length and in the power-splitting ratio of the coupler. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.