Cascaded higher-order soliton for non-adiabatic pulse compression

Non-adiabatic pulse compression of cascaded higher-order optical soliton is investigated. We demonstrate high degree compression of pulses with soliton orders N=2, 3, 4, and 5 in two or three nonlinear fibers with different second-order dispersion coefficients. Each fiber length is shorter than half of its soliton period. This compression technique has significant advantages over the widely reported adiabatic and higher-order soliton compression. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America