Characterization of supercontinuum process pumped by amplified dissipative solitons

Abstract

We report an experimental study of the supercontinuum (SC) generated by molecules of solitons (MS) and noise-like pulses (NLP) and their dependence on pump power in two different types of optical fibers: 500 m of standard fiber (SMF-28, Corning) and 100 m of high-nonlinearity fiber with a zero-dispersion slope (Furukawa HNLF-ZS). Our results show a more complex dependence of the SC spectra on pump power for the MS than for the NLP used for pump. We attribute such differences to soliton fission of MS whereas this process is already done within the NLP. We use a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) connected to the output of the fiber under test to evaluate the amplitude of ultrashort pulses, which compose SC and found that amplitude is changed strongly throughout the spectrum. The NOLM suppresses pulses with low peak power, this is especially pronounced for wavelengths longer than ∼1750 nm for both fibers, and in the region between 1450 nm–1640 nm for the high-nonlinearity fiber.