Supercontinuum Generation of Higher-Order Solitons by Fission in Photonic Crystal Fibers

Abstract

The nonlinear pulse propagation in photonic crystal fibers without slowly varying envelope approximation is studied using an improved variant of first-order wave equation. Supercontinuum generation is shown to be caused by a novel mechanism of spectral broadening through fission of higher-order solitons into redshifted fundamental solitons and blueshifted nonsolitonic radiation. Good agreement with experimental observations is found, and subcycle pulse compression is studied.