Compression of Hermite-Gaussian pulses in an engineered optical fiber absorber with varying dispersion and nonlinearity

The compression of Hermite-Gaussian pulses in an engineered optical fiber absorber with varying dispersion and nonlinearity is studied both analytically and numerically. New parametric condition for such a pulse compression is obtained. The stabilities of these self-similar pulses, even at the maximum pulse compression, are then demonstrated under the perturbations of the additive white noise and the higher-order nonlinear effects such as self-steepening and self-frequency shift accompanying the severe pulse compression. This work may lead to other new methods for efficient generation of low-energetic ultrashort pulses with high quality. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.