Abstract

The temporal Talbot effect can be used^1,2 to obtain high-repetition-rate optical pulse trains with potential applications in telecommunications. If a pulse train is dispersed in a medium such that adjacent spectral components become temporally separated by a fraction, 1/M, of its initial period, then a train with a repetition rate M times higher will result. In optical fibers, arbitrary repetition rates can be obtained through the choice of the dispersion-length product and the initial repetition rate. The largest repetition rate obtainable is limited by the spectral bandwidth of the pulse train.

© 2002 Optical Society of America