Abstract
Recently, we have shown that soliton propagation and spectral filtering can be used to reduce the intensity noise of solitons in optical fibers to below the quantum mechanical shot-noise limit.1-3 The technique is simple: optical pulses are propagated as higher-order solitons down a fiber for several soliton periods and then spectrally filtered. (Fundamental solitons have a hyperbolic secant amplitude N normalized to unity. We define higher-order solitons as those having N>1.) Higher-order solitons “breathe” as they propagate: their spectrum changes shape and width in a way that depends on their initial energy. Consequently, the transmission of solitons through a spectral filter after propagation is energy dependent, leading to a nonlinear input/output (I/O) energy-transfer relationship. By operating at zero-slope points on the I/O curve (i.e., where the output energy does not change in response to small input fluctuations), we could squeeze the noise of 2.7-ps solitons to 3.7 dB below the shot-noise level.1 Recent experiments with 160-fs pulses have demonstrated >4.5-dB squeezing.4
© 1998 Optical Society of America
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