Abstract

Fiber Bragg gratings have received much attention recently as dispersion compensators [1, 2]. All experiments to date have employed chirped fiber gratings, in reflection, thus requiring a coupler or circulator to access the reflected signal. Here we report, for the first time to our knowledge, dispersion compensation using a fibre grating in transmission We do so by operating at wavelengths outside the main reflection band where the grating exhibits strong dispersion. While even a uniform Bragg grating has this property, residual out of band reflections and the associated resonances make it undesirable. Therefore, use of an apodised or tapered grating, with very low out of band reflection is preferred. In our experiment a 11 cm long tapered grating operated in transmission is used to compensate for 100 km of non dispersion shifted fiber at 1.545 μm.

© 1996 Optical Society of America