Soliton squeezing in a Mach-Zehnder fiber interferometer

A scheme for generating amplitude squeezed light by means of soliton self-phase modulation is experimentally demonstrated. By injecting 180-fs pulses into an equivalent Mach-Zehnder fiber interferometer, a maximum noise reduction of $4.4\pm 0.3$ dB is obtained $(6.3\mathrm{}\pm 0.6$ dB when corrected for losses). The dependence of noise reduction on the interferometer splitting ratio and fiber length is studied in detail.