Abstract

A new effect appears in femtosecond optical pulse compression, using single-mode fibers, that we describe as optical wave breaking. In the fiber, frequency-shifted light in the leading and trailing edges of a pulse overtakes unshifted light in the pulse tails. Mixing of these overlapping frequency components generates sidelobes on the pulse spectrum. The effect often leads to computational instabilities, but careful numerical simulations, including fiber loss, give results in excellent agreement with experiment.

© 1985 Optical Society of America

Wave breaking in nonlinear-optical fibers

D. Anderson, M. Desaix, M. Lisak, and M. L. Quiroga–Teixeiro
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 9(8) 1358-1361 (1992)

Wave-breaking-free pulses in nonlinear-optical fibers

D. Anderson, M. Desaix, M. Karlsson, M. Lisak, and M. L. Quiroga-Teixeiro
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 10(7) 1185-1190 (1993)

Optical wave breaking and pulse compression due to cross-phase modulation in optical fibers

Govind P. Agrawal, P. L. Baldeck, and R. R. Alfano
Opt. Lett. 14(2) 137-139 (1989)

Pulse compression by nonlinear pulse evolution with reduced optical wave breaking in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

K. Tamura and M. Nakazawa
Opt. Lett. 21(1) 68-70 (1996)

Wave-breaking-extended fiber supercontinuum generation for high compression ratio transform-limited pulse compression

Yuan Liu, Haohua Tu, and Stephen A. Boppart
Opt. Lett. 37(12) 2172-2174 (2012)