Supercontinuum generation and soliton timing jitter in SF6 soft glass photonic crystal fibers

We use broadband frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) and cross-correlation FROG (XFROG) techniques to study the details of the supercontinuum generated in extruded soft glass SF6 photonic crystal fibers pumped with envelope-modulated 100 fs pulses at telecom wavelengths. Strong temporal jitter of solitons is observed with highly non-Gaussian statistics, which is related to the statistics of the pump pulse envelope shape fluctuations. The ripples present on the input pulse seed the modulation instability at high pump powers, affecting soliton fission. Numerical modeling confirms strong sensitivity of the soliton fission process to the presence of ripples on the pump pulse envelope. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.