Analyses and Applications of Supercontinuum Generation and Parametric Process in Nonlinear Optical Fibers

In this thesis, we investigated two nonlinear phenomena in optical fibers -- supercontinuum generation (SCG) and parametric effects. We developed numerical tools to analyze SCG and to design devices based on parametric effects.
When injecting short pulses with high peak power into optical fibers, generally fibers with high nonlinearities, coherent broadband light called supercontinuum is generated through complex interplays between linear and nonlinear effects. SCG has applications in areas of optical communications, frequency metrology, medical images, and so on. The mechanism of SCG is still under investigation because too many effects are involved. We develop numerical tools to monitor SCG evolutions. Our results show that fission of higher-order solitons might be the dominant effects. The tools and analyses will help SCG experiment and optimization in the future.
Parametric effects have several applications in optical networks such as optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) and parametric wavelength converters (PWCs). Hybrid-fiber OPA has been proposed to improve the gain flatness of OPAs. We studied the gain-flatness stability of hybrid-fiber OPAs and find that the precise fiber dispersion profiles are required, which might prevent them from practical use. PWCs, by our definition, are tunable wavelength converters for high-speed wavelength routing. We design PWCs using nonlinear dispersion flattened fibers with two zero-dispersion wavelengths. We investigated the effect of second zero-dispersion wavelength and provided a simple guide line for PWC design.