Highly nonlinear and anomalously dispersive lead silicate glass holey fibers

In this paper we present significant progress on the fabrication of small-core lead-silicate holey fibers. The glass used in this work is SF57, a commercially available, highly nonlinear Schott glass. We report the fabrication of small core SF57 fibers with a loss as low as 2.6 dB/m at 1550 nm, and the fabrication of fibers with a nonlinear coefficient as high as 640 W-1 km(-1). We demonstrate the generation of Raman solitons at similar to1550 nm in a short length of such a fiber which highlights the fact that the group velocity dispersion can be anomalous at these wavelengths despite the large normal material dispersion of the glass around 1550 nm. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.