Tunable nonlinearly-bend-chirped fiber Bragg grating for third-order dispersion compensation

Summary form only given. It has been shown that chirped fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) can be used for the compensation of not only the group velocity dispersion (GVD) but also the 3/sup rd/-order dispersion (TOD). However, conventional chirped FBGs usually suffer from group-delay ripple (GDR) problems, typically > 10 ps, caused by stitching errors, step-chirp errors and fabrication imperfections. Due to the relatively low group delay value of the TOD component compared to that of the GVD, a low GDR is highly desirable for high-quality compensation. It is also highly attractive if a device can offer tunability in the TOD component, which is not possible in conventional devices. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinearly-bend-chirped FBG, which is tunable and has a low GDR, suitable for the compensation of TOD. We have demonstrated transmission of 10 GHz, 2.6 ps pulses over 98 km of dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) with full TOD compensation using this device.