Abstract

In the long pulse regime, supercontinuum (SC) generation is very sensitive to the input noise of the pump pulses resulting in poor coherence properties and stability [1]. Recently, the susceptibility of the dynamics to the input noise was shown to induce large shot-to-shot fluctuations when the initial stage of the SC mechanism is driven by modulation instability, leading to the generation of rare pulses with abnormally high intensity [2]. Recently, the noise amplification characteristics of modulation instability and subsequent stages of SC generation were observed in real time using a time-stretching technique which allows to capture single-shot SC spectra [2,3]. In this way, significant insight can be obtained into the SC dynamics that would be otherwise impossible to observe from average quantities, and indeed wavelength correlations in the SC have been shown to exhibit a rich structure that can be connected to the energy exchange dynamics along propagation [3].

© 2013 IEEE