Abstract

In recent years, significant research attention has focused on microstructure fibers, especially on photonic crystal fibers (PCFs).¹ But the detailed mechanism of the complicated supercontinuum generation has not been revealed, particularly for the input optical pulses are of a few cycles. Its clarification is significantly important for the generation of monocycle optical pulse.^2,3 In this paper, we demonstrate the experimental evolution of ultra-broad spectra generated by PCFs of different lengths, and theoretically analyze the nonlinear process based on our derived nonlinear propagation equation beyond the slowly-vary- ing-envelope approximation (SVEA).

© 2002 Optical Society of America