Modal Birefringence Dependent Supercontinuum Due to Cross-Phase Modulation in a Dispersion-Flattened/Decreasing Fiber

It was found by numerical analysis that a 320 nm wide and flat spectrum at 20 dB less than the central maximum intensity is generated from cross-phase modulated soliton pulses with 3.5 ps pulse width and 2.3 W peak power, which are propagated through a 2.4km length of dispersion-flattened/decreasing fiber (DFDF). The cross-phase modulation (XPM) at a central wavelength of 1.55 μm is achieved by exciting two orthogonally polarized modes into the principal axes. The wave-vector mismatch between the orthogonal pulses can be neglected because of soliton trapping when the modal birefringence of the DFDF is less than |nox - n0y| = 10−6. The effect of modal birefringence on supercontinuum generation is discussed in temporal and spectral regimes by numerical analysis.