The specification describes an optical fiber device for propagating and recompressing high energy, ultrashort pulses with minimal distortions due to nonlinearity. The device is based on propagation in a higher order mode (HOM) of a few-moded fiber. Coupling into the HOM may be accomplished using long-period gratings. Features of the HOM fiber mode that are useful for high quality pulse compression include large effective area, high dispersion and low dispersion slope. In a preferred case the long period gratings go through a turn-around point (TAP) at the wavelength of operation.