We report on an experimental study of supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers with low-intensity femtosecond pulses, which provides evidence for a novel spectral broadening mechanism. The observed results agree with our theoretical calculations carried out without making the slowly varying envelope approximation. Peculiarities of the measured spectra and their theoretical explanation demonstrate that the reason for the white-light generation in photonic crystal fibers is fission of higher-order solitons into redshifted fundamental solitons and blueshifted nonsolitonic radiation.

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Photoluminescence (PL) spectra and time-resolved PL data from AlGaAs/GaAs superlattice structures containing thin InAs layers of about 1–3 monolayer grown on semi-insulating (001)-oriented GaAs substrates at lowered temperatures are studied. The size distribution of InAs quantum dots (QDs) among different families (modes) is controlled by variation of growth temperature and/or growth interruption. We demonstrate the stabilization of the PL magnitude caused by strong coupling between different modes and the full width at half maximum of “large size” QD modes within a certain temperature interval (50–150 K) due to feeding of the radiative transitions from nonradiative decay and carrier transfer arising from decaying excitonic states of the small size QD modes. Strong competition between different channels of ground state relaxation leads to an oscillating dependence of the PL transient for the small size QD mode. Efficient inter- and intramode tunneling rules out “bottleneck restrictions” for the PL. The parameters of intra- and intermode tunneling are determined from time-resolved PL.

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A thin-disk regenerative amplifier based on Yb-doped potassium yttrium tungstate is operated at 40 kHz with an output pulse energy of 116 microJ and a pulse duration of 250 fs. Dispersive stretching of the pulse during amplification instead of an external stretcher is used to avoid high peak intensities. The small amount of the laser active material in the amplifier inherent for the thin-disk laser design and a large beam radius in the Pockels cell reduce nonlinear effects further. Consequently the output pulses can be compressed to 250 fs using a pair of diffraction gratings.