Abstract

Theoretical studies of nonlinear fiber optics¹ have generally assumed a deterministic form for the input electromagnetic field. However, this is not the case in practice since even laser light is only partially coherent and has a finite spectral bandwidth. Recently, Manassah² investigated the effect of self-phase modulation (SPM) on a stochastic optical field with Gaussian statistics, showing that in this case the spectrum is broadened. However, the laser light does not have the statistical character of a Gaussian random process, and a more general approach is required for modeling the experimental results.

© 1993 Optical Society of America