| This Master's report covers the theoretical and experimental aspects of fiber Bragg gratings, as well as their applications as filters in pulse shaping. Since pulses of arbitrary temporal shape can be generated by spectrally filtering a short pulse, frequency selective reflectors such as fiber Bragg gratings can be designed to obtain the desired pulse shape. We calculated the required distribution of the refractive index modulation (amplitude and phase) of the gratings using inverse scattering and Born approximation techniques. We then photo-wrote the gratings in an optical fiber using standard phase-mask scanning techniques. Two Bragg gratings were specially designed to shape a train of gaussian pulses into antisymmetric Hermite-Gauss pulses. The antisymmetric pulses were propagated in standard fiber to verify the presence of the phase shift between the two lobes. These Hermite-Gauss pulses could be used to study antisymmetric dispersion-managed soliton pulses. |
