Designing Tapered Holey Fibers for Soliton Compression

We investigate numerically the compression of femtosecond solitons at 1.55-mum wavelength propagating in holey fibers which exhibit simultaneously decreasing dispersion and effective mode area. We determine optimal values of holey fiber parameters and fiber lengths for soliton compression in the adiabatic and nonadiabatic regimes. Compression factors in excess of ten are found for fibers as short as a few meters.