Abstract

It is important to clarify the noise characteristics in a supercontinuum (SC) pulse source for its application to high-capacity optical communications[1]-[3]. Morioka et al have measured bit-error rates (BER) [4] and timing jitters[5] in filtered SC pulses and showed that the SC pulses have BER and jitter characteristics almost equal to those of the pump pulses. Recently, we have successfully performed numerical simulations of SC generation[6] and had a good agreement with the previous experiment [4]. Since the simulation model is based on classical beam propagation in a nonlinear medium with no stochastic processes, the noise characteristics in SC generation should be from deterministic processes such as fluctuation in the pump pulses and not from stochastic processes such as background spontaneous emission. On the analogy of many nonlinear phenomena, it is predicted that slight fluctuation in pump pulses is inherited by generated SC pulses with amplification.

© 1998 Optical Society of America