A new wide-band pulse-restoration technique for digital fiber-optic communication systems using temporal gratings

We demonstrate a new wide-band (over 20 nm) pulse-restoration technique, based on real-time Fourier transformation of an array of pulses acting as a temporal grating in a dispersive medium. A compression factor of 48 is demonstrated using an array of 16 coherent pulses. This method can be adapted for long-distance digital high-data rate, dense wavelength-division-multiplexed and time-division-multiplexed communication over single-mode fibers. We anticipate the pulse compression factor will vary by less than 10% over a bandwidth of 100 nm.