Propagation of highly chirped pulses in fiber-optic communications systems

The propagation of strongly chirped pulses in an amplified fiber-optic communications system is experimentally investigated. Spectral narrowing of the pulses is observed. The narrowing is attributed to interplay between the initial chirp and the nonlinearity in the transmission line. Four-wave mixing (FWM) between wavelength channels is found to be similar to that for unchirped nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) pulses. Low error rate transmission over 720 km is achieved using these chirped pulses, which are generated by a transmitter based on a mode-locked fiber laser.