Breaking fundamental noise limitations to supercontinuum generation

Abstract

Supercontinuum generation in the anomalous group-velocity dispersion regime is widely considered to be inherently unstable against input pulse fluctuations. This constraint has compelled a coherent supercontinuum to be triggered by femtosecond pulses. In this work, conditions for breaking this fundamental limitation are analytically derived and realized in a silicon waveguide by exploiting the Kerr nonlinearity dispersion. On this basis, coherent supercontinuum generation with picosecond pulses and anomalous group-velocity dispersion is numerically demonstrated, which crosses a long-standing frontier in nonlinear optics.

Soliton-number measurement in lossy waveguides

“…Loss managament is becoming increasingly important in areas of nonlinear optics exploiting plasmons, PTsymmetry [1], 2D materials [2] or dispersive nonlinearities [3]. In these systems, the interplays between nonlinear, dispersive (or diffractive), and loss (or gain) effects are instrumental.…”

Nonlinearity measurement undergoing dispersion and loss

“…Despite these envisaged issues, strong interplays between nonlinearities, dispersion (or diffraction), and loss (or gain) may occur in several cases with fundamental and technological relevance including nonlinear plasmonics [10,11], nonlinear PT -symmetric photonic systems [12], and nonlinear optics in integrated waveguides with 2D materials [13,14] or dispersive nonlinearities [15]. In addition, measurements of γ in lossy waveguides can be instrumental to check experimentally the different theoretical expressions reported to date for γ [16], as well as an effective means to study γ in active fibers.…”