All-optical 1.5 μm to 1.3 μm wavelength conversion in a walk-off compensating nonlinear optical loop mirror

We demonstrate highly efficient all-optical conversion from 1.5 μm to 1.3 μm using a novel nonlinear optical loop mirror that compensates for walk-off. We make the fiber loop by splicing alternating segments of standard single-mode and dispersion-shifted fibers and choose their lengths such that the walk-off of the 1.3 μm and 1.5 μm pulses in one segment is completely reversed in the adjacent segment. We also show that the width of the converted pulses can be tailored by this scheme.