Two-color pulse compression in aperiodically-poled lithium niobate

We experimentally demonstrate engineerable compression of two-colored pulses in a linearly-chirped quasi-phase-matching grating. Quadratic solitons generated from fundamental input are reshaped through cascaded parametric processes of second-harmonic generation (SHG) and the back-conversion. We use type-I (e: o + o) SHG geometry in a 50-mm-long aperiodically-poled MgC:LiNbO3 device to satisfy the group-velocity matching condition. Simultaneously compressed fundamental and SH pulses of about 55-fs duration with small pedestal are generated from the fundamental input pulses of 95-fs duration. Crown Copyright (c) 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.