Design and demonstration of highly versatile nonlinearly strain-chirped fiber Bragg gratings for tunable dispersion slope compensation

Summary form only given. Previously, we have demonstrated the first nonlinearly strain-chirped fiber Bragg grating (NSCFBG), which has an adjustable dispersion slope (DS) designed for compensation of waveform distortion caused by the optical fiber. The substrate of the device is linearly tapered in its width and clamped on the narrower end while deflecting its free end, and can convert a mounted uniform FBG into a NSCFBG. In this paper, we extend the study into the analysis of the NSCFBGs and determine limitations of the associate device as a DS compensator. Based on the design, a device with an adjustable DS range of 20 ps/nm/sup 2/ has been fabricated with a 3-dB useful compensation bandwidth >2 nm. In addition, it can be continuously tuned up to -83 ps/nm/sup 2/ for a 3-dB bandwidth in excess of 1.35 nm, which is sufficient to compensate for a 1185-km-long of dispersion-shifted-fiber (DSF) having a DS of 0.07 ps/nm/sup 2//km.