Stable supercontinuum generation in short lengths of conventional dispersion-shifted fiber.

By propagating 500-fs pulses through 2.5 m of standard fiber followed by 2 m of dispersion-shifted fiber, we generated >200 nm of spectral continuum between 1430 and 1630 nm, which is flat to less than ?0.5 dB over more than 60 nm. Pulses obtained by filtering the continuum show no increase in timing jitter over the source laser and are pedestal free to >28 dB, indicating excellent stability and coherence. We show that the second- and third-order dispersions of the continuum fiber and self-phase modulation are primarily responsible for the continuum generation and spectral shaping and found close agreement between simulations and experiments.

[1]  M. Saruwatari,et al.  Ultrawide spectral range group-velocity dispersion measurement utilizing supercontinuum in an optical fiber pumped by a 1.5 /spl mu/m compact laser source , 1995 .

[2]  H. H. Chen,et al.  Soliton at the zero-group-dispersion wavelength of a single-model fiber. , 1987, Optics letters.

[3]  R. Stolen,et al.  Extreme picosecond pulse narrowing by means of soliton effect in single-mode optical fibers. , 1983, Optics letters.

[4]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  1 Tbit/s (100 Gbit/s × 10 channel) OTDM/WDM transmission using a single supercontinuum WDM source , 1996 .

[5]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  Flatly broadened supercontinuum spectrum generated in a dispersion decreasing fibre with convex dispersion profile , 1997 .

[6]  M. Nishimura,et al.  Generation of ultra-broad-band supercontinuum by dispersion-flattened and decreasing fiber , 1998, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[7]  Dietrich Marcuse,et al.  An alternative derivation of the Gordon-Haus effect , 1992 .

[8]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  Nearly penalty-free, <4 ps supercontinuum Gbit/s pulse generation over 1535-1560 nm , 1994 .

[9]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  Transform-limited, femtosecond WDM pulse generation by spectral filtering of gigahertz supercontinuum , 1994 .

[10]  D. Wood.  Constraints on the bit rates in direct detection optical communication systems using linear or soliton pulses , 1990 .

[11]  Chinlon Lin,et al.  Self-phase modulation in silica optical fibers (A) , 1978 .

[12]  Y. Takushima,et al.  Generation of over 140-nm-wide super-continuum from a normal dispersion fiber by using a mode-locked semiconductor laser source , 1998, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[13]  D. Richardson,et al.  Soliton pulse compression in dispersion-decreasing fiber. , 1993, Optics letters.

[14]  Ken-ichi Kitayama,et al.  325 nm bandwidth supercontinuum generation at 10 Gbit/s using dispersion-flattened and non-decreasing normal dispersion fibre with pulse compression technique , 1998 .

[15]  D. Linde.  Characterization of the noise in continuously operating mode-locked lasers , 1986 .