Analyses of coherence-maintained ultrashort optical pulse trains and supercontinuum generation in the presence of soliton–amplified spontaneous-emission interaction

Abstract

Coherence degradation in the soliton pulse-compression process and supercontinuum generation in the presence of amplified spontaneous emission are studied with numerical simulations. We have developed a new simulation method to study the quality of a pulse train and use numerical simulations to present three ways to suppress its coherence degradation. We point out that a simple measurement of the pulse train’s power spectrum does not fully represent the quality of the pulse train because it does not contain detailed information on noise.