On the spectral dynamics of noise-seeded modulation instability in optical fibers

P. I. FIERENS; S. M. HERNANDEZ; J. BONETTI; D. F. GROSZ

Conferencia; International Conference on Theory and Applications in Nonlinear Dynamics; 2016

We revisit modulation instability in optical fibers, including all relevanteffects, such as higher-order dispersion terms, self-steepening, and theRaman response. Our analysis allows us to calculate the spectral evolutionof a small perturbation to a continuous pump, and thus obtain an analyticalexpression for the small-signal spectral dynamics, showing excellent agreementwith numerical simulations. We apply the expression for the spectralevolution to the case of white Gaussian noise and calculate some relevantmetrics of the resulting signal, such as its coherence and signal-to-noise ratio.These calculations might shed some light on the nonlinear phenomena ofsupercontinuum generation.