Experimental Observation of Picosecond Pulse Narrowing and Solitons in Optical Fibers

This paper reports narrowing and splitting of 7-ps-duration pulses from a mode-locked color-center laser by a 700-m-long, single-mode silica-glass fiber, at a wavelength (1.55 \ensuremath{\mu}m) of loss and large but negative group-velocity dispersion. At certain critical power levels, the observed behavior is characteristic of solitons.