Abstract

The propagation of short pulses along optical fibers is governed by many different physical effects, some of them being inherent as reflected by the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS), others being higher order effects as reflected by the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Their relative importance to supercontinuum (SC) generation is determined already by the initial data. Especially the pulse width is shown to determine the basic SC-generation mechanism which in turn dictates the basic features of the resulting ultrabroad spectrum. Moreover, soliton fission and the modulation instability (MI), which can be described solely by the NLS with some perturbation are the guiding effects. We therefore focus on the detailed evolution of the SC generation under the main influence of MI and soliton fission and the interplay between them. All higher-order effects except the third-order dispersion (TOD) were neglected in our numerical investigation of the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation

© 2007 IEEE