Spectral, temporal, and coherence properties of supercontinuum generation in microstructure fiber

Spectral, temporal, and coherence properties of supercontinuum (SC) generation in a microstructure fiber were experimentally studied with low-peak-power femtosecond pump pulses. By a spectral interferometry approach, the degree of mutual (axial) spectral coherence was observed to be low for solitons with a pump wavelength region close to the zero-dispersion wavelength (ZDW) and was observed to be high for the solitons with a pump wavelength region far from the ZDW The generation of multiple frequency channels was experimentally demonstrated by dual time-delayed low-peak-power pump pulses near and far from the ZDW for possible application in a wavelength-division-multiplexing network. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.