Recent advances in long dispersion compensating fibre Bragg gratings

We have shown that very long high quality broad bandwidth fibre gratings are possible to design to have dispersion profiles that match dispersion compensation requirements imposed upon a signal pulse in a given transmission system. An approach to the fabrication of such long gratings is introduced and results of up to 1 m long high quality fibre gratings are shown. The imperfections that can be imprinted into, either during the fabrication of-or from the fibre host to-the grating are discussed and a technique to reduce these are presented.