Adaptive control in optical fibers

Adpative control in combination with ultrafast pulse shaping provides a compelling approach to defeat dispersion, distortion and harness nonlinear phenomena on the femtosecond timescale. Ultrafast pulses propagating in optical fibers generate a number of linear and nonlinear effects which affect the pulse during its travel. The main causes stem from the dependence of the index of refraction on frequency (given that short pulses have a large bandwidth) and from the so-called self-action effects which involve the dependence of the index of refraction on the pulse intensity (which is high given that the pulse energy is confined to a very short amount of time)