Patent ID: 7352504

Claim:
An optical Fourier transform device comprising: a parabolic optical pulse generator to generate a control optical pulse of a shape expressed by a quadratic function or a parabola; a coupler to couple a signal optical pulse with the control optical pulse; an optical Kerr medium to linearly chirp the signal optical pulse over an entire pulse, or a wide time range by cross phase modulation between the signal optical pulse and the control optical pulse; and a dispersive medium having a group-velocity dispersion, wherein the launched signal optical pulse and the control optical pulse are coupled by the coupler and are introduced into the optical Kerr medium, the launched signal optical pulse is linearly chirped at a chirp rate K by the optical Kerr medium by the cross phase modulation between the signal optical pulse and the control optical pulse, the signal optical pulse emitted from the optical Kerr medium is made to pass through the dispersive medium whose dispersion amount D is D=1/K, to convert a temporal waveform of the launched signal optical pulse into a shape of a frequency spectrum thereof.