%0 Journal Article %T Soliton pulse compression through cascaded quadratic nonlinearity in difference-frequency generation %A Ke Wang %A LieJia Qian %A HeYuan Zhu %J Chinese Science Bulletin %@ 1861-9541 %D 2008 %I %R 10.1007/s11434-008-0217-5 %X Cascaded nonlinearity based soliton pulse compression in the process of femtosecond difference frequency generation is studied theoretically. A set of simplified coupled wave equations under the conditions of large phase mismatch and matched group velocities is obtained, which reveals the physical mechanism of soliton compression in this process. Numerical simulations demonstrate that in the presence of group velocity dispersion and equivalent cross phase modulation, both the pump and the signal pulses can be compressed with a high compression ratio. %K soliton compression %K difference frequency generation %K cascaded nonlinearity %K equivalent cross phase modulation %U http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-008-0217-5