Soliton compression in short lengths of microstructured fibres

Compression of soliton pulses propagating in optical fibers with decreasing dispersion is a well-established technique. Very recently, we have demonstrated the same effect with femtosecond pulses in dispersion-decreasing microstructured holey fibres. With such short pulses and because of the small core size and thus high nonlinearity possible within holey fibres, compression already occurs at very low soliton energies and over short lengths of fibre. Short fibre lengths are also required because of higher propagation losses in holey fibres which counteract compression. Here we investigate theoretically the minimum fibre length necessary to achieve high compression factors.