Abstract
Supercontinuum (SC) generation in microstructured fibers is one of the richest examples of nonlinear optics. Using only nanojoule pulses from a mode-locked oscillator, octave-spanning spectra can readily be generated. The remarkable efficiency of the spectral broadening has been investigated in numerous studies and is exploited for a wealth of applications. Despite of more than a decade of research, SC still holds surprising findings, e.g., an analogy of the propagation dynamics to the event horizon [1] as well as the emergence of rogue waves [2]. It is now understood that noise amplification plays a crucial role in the formation of optical rogue waves. Ultimately, input fluctuations of the field at the quantum noise level induce substantial pulse-to-pulse fluctuations of the spectral energy distributions of the output SC pulse train, resulting in the random occurrence of extreme rogue waves. The very same process can be understood as a loss of coherence between successive pulses in the train, which practically prevents the temporal compression of fiber supercontinua [3]. While this loss of coherence is typically considered a malign feature of SC generation, we show in this contribution that there may be a surprising beneficial application of the noise amplification capability. Launching a pulse train with a weak sinusoidal amplitude modulation into the microstructure fiber, we observe up to 30-fold optical signal amplification of this modulation after the fiber.
© 2013 IEEE
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