Experimental observation of picosecond pulse narrowing and solitons in optical fibers

The propagation of ultrashort (picosecond) pulses in optical fibers is a matter of considerable contemporary interest, both to communications and to pure science. The effect of the inevitable dispersion, acting alone, is always to broaden such pulses. Thus at first there would appear to be only one way to avoid pulse broadening: to tune the source to the wavelength (for low-loss silica glass fibers, typically in the neighborhood of 1.3 µm) where the (group velocity) dispersion passes through zero.