Describing supercontinuum noise and rogue wave statistics using higher-order moments

We show that the noise properties of fiber supercontinuum generation and the appearance of long-tailed rogue wave statistics can be accurately quantified using statistical higher-order central moments. Statistical measures of skew and kurtosis, as well as the coefficient of variation provide improved insight into the nature of spectral fluctuations across the supercontinuum and allow regions of long-tailed statistics to be clearly identified. These moments - that depend only on analyzing intensity fluctuations - provide a complementary tool to phase-dependent coherence measures to interpret supercontinuum noise. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.