Propagation of high-power parabolic pulses in cubicon fiber amplifiers

We have theoretically studied pulse propagation in a normal-dispersion optical cubicon fiber amplifier with an arbitrary longitudinal gain profile, and we have obtained expressions for the phase phi(z, tau), chirp delta omega, and amplitude A(z, tau) for such amplifiers when the nonlinear phase shifts and the third order dispersion (TOD) are all included. The results show that the characteristics of self-similarity and linear chirp are lost due to the TOD. However, by using mutual compensation between the nonlinear phase and the TOD, we can still obtain a pulse with optimal compression. Furthermore, for a given TOD, there exists an optimal nonlinear phase for compressing the pulse. A numerical simulation is consistent with the analytical results. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America