| Summary: | The development of photonic crystal fibre from conventional optical fibre follows a trend in the development of materials, to create composites and structured materials on smaller and smaller scales. In fact the great success of photonic crystal fibre is largely due to the ability to structure it on scales comparable to the wavelength of light. It is this micron size structure that allows the creation of an (out of plane) optical bandgap in silica and allows hollow core fibre to guide light in an air core freeing the guided mode from the properties of bulk silica. This thesis focuses on the propagation and compression of high peak power optical solitons in hollow core fibre. As the Kerr nonlinear response of air is approximately a thousand times less than that of silica, the air core of hollow core fibre can support much higher peak powers than conventional optical fibre without the manifestation of nonlinear effects, making it ideal for the delivery of high peak power laser pulses. Coupled with this, hollow core fibre has a large region of anomalous dispersion in its transmission window allowing optical pulses to be transmitted as temporal solitons freeing them from the effects of dispersion. The author started his Ph.D. in 2006, three years after the first demonstration of soliton propagation in hollow core fibre and as the first demonstrations of soliton compression in hollow core fibre were being undertaken. Work by the author to build upon these early demonstrations is presented in this thesis in the following manner: Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are theory chapters. Chapter 1 explains the background waveguide theory and theory of nonlinear optics that is used throughout the thesis. Chapter 2 details the properties of photonic crystal fibres focusing on hollow core fibre. Chapter 3 details recent papers relevant to the propagation and compression of solitons in hollow core fibre. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are experimental chapters reporting work undertaken by the author. Chapter 4 focuses on modifying the nonlinearity of hollow core fibre and measuring the dispersion of hollow core fibre accurately. Chapter 5 focuses on the compression of chirped and unchirped picosecond pulses in dispersion decreasing hollow core fibre tapers. Chapter 6 reports the compression in hollow core fibre of femtosecond pulses centred at 540nm wavelength through soliton effect compression.
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