Measurement of soliton decay and dispersive wave generation in photonic crystal fiber

Soliton decay and dispersive wave generation in photonic crystal fiber (PCF) are investigated. Grating-eliminated no-nonsense observation of ultrafast incident laser light e-fields technique is used to measure the temporal and spectral evolutions of soliton. Soliton decay and dispersive wave generation are clearly demonstrated. At low pump power, there is only soliton decay and no dispersive wave generated because all frequencies are in the anomalous dispersion region of the PCF, and the soliton spectrum does not touch the spectrum of linear dispersive waves. At relatively high power, a part of the soliton energy is transferred from soliton to a dispersive wave and falls on the blue side of the original carrier frequency of the incident pulse. (C) 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)