1. Introduction
1.1. Ultrashort pulses
1.2. Characteristics of optical pulses
1.3. Generation of broadband spectra
1.4. Time-bandwidth product
1.5. Applications of ultrashort pulses
1.6. Ultrashort-pulse-generation techniques
1.7. Pulse compression
1.8. Experiments with pulse-compression techniques
1.9. Organization of this book
2. Photonic crystal fiber
2.1. Optical fiber
2.2. Guiding mechanism of optical fiber
2.3. Optical fiber construction
2.4. Modes in optical fiber
2.5. Normalized frequency (V number) of a core
2.6. Transmission window
2.7. Pulse compression in optical fiber
2.8. Photonic crystal fiber
2.9. Fabrication of photonic crystal fiber
2.10. Material selection for PCF modeling
2.11. Advantages
2.12. Pulse compression in PCF
3. Theory and modeling of photonic crystal fiber
3.1. Numerical methods
3.2. The fully vectorial effective index method
3.3. Group velocity dispersion (GVD)
3.4. Mode parameters of PCF
3.5. Linear properties of photonic crystal fiber
3.6. Nonlinear properties of photonic crystal fiber
3.7. Finite-element method
4. Soliton propagation
4.1. Soliton
4.2. Nonlinear propagation in optical fiber
4.3. Split-step Fourier method
4.4. Nonlinear propagation in optical fiber
4.5. Importance of optical solitons
4.6. Why solitons in photonic crystal fiber?
5. Conventional compression schemes
5.1. Mechanism of pulse compression
5.2. Soliton compression
5.3. Quality analysis
5.4. Adiabatic compression
5.5. Pulse-parameter equation
5.6. Projection operator method
6. Self-similar compression
6.1. Review of pulse compression
6.2. Pulse compression through self-similar analysis
7. Pulse compression in nonlinear optical loop mirrors
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Nonlinear optical loop mirrors
7.3. Numerical model of an NOLM
7.4. Applications of NOLMs
7.5. Soliton propagation in NOLMs
7.6. Soliton pulse compression in NOLMs
8. Cascaded compression
8.1. Cascaded compression
8.2. Effect of temperature on chloroform-infiltrated PCF
8.3. Theoretical modeling of cascaded PCF
8.4. Compression through a cascaded PCF
8.5. Quality analysis
9. Supercontinuum compression
9.1. Supercontinuum generation
9.2. Physical mechanisms
9.3. Pulse compression through SCG
9.4. Tunable pulse compression
9.5. Theoretical model.