Dynamics of femtosecond supercontinuum generation in multimode fibers

We solve a system of generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equations to study the nonlinear dynamics of ultrashort pulse propagation in multimode fibers. Due to pulse walk-off, permanent intermodal power transfer between modes is observed even in absence of phase matching. The strength of intermodal effects is found to depend strongly on modal symmetries, which results in preferential coupling between the LP0n modes. The scaling of nonlinear multimode effects in large-core fibers for the generation of ultra-high power spectral density supercontinua is finally discussed. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America