Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Light trapping in gravity-like potentials and expansion of supercontinuum spectra in photonic-crystal fibres

Abstract

Femtosecond pulses of light propagating along photonic-crystal fibres can generate a broad optical supercontinuum1,2. This striking discovery has applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology3 to telecommunication4 and medicine5,6. Among the physical principles underlying supercontinuum generation are soliton emission7, a variety of four-wave mixing processes8,9,10,11, Raman-induced soliton self-frequency shift12,13, and dispersive wave generation mediated by solitons7,13,14. Although all of the above effects contribute to supercontinuum generation, none of them can explain the generation of blue and violet light from infrared femtosecond pump pulses. In this work we argue that the most profound role in the shaping of the short-wavelength edge of the continuum is played by the effect of radiation trapping in a gravity-like potential created by accelerating solitons. The underlying physics of this effect has a straightforward analogy with the inertial forces acting on an observer moving with a constant acceleration.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Numerical simulation of supercontinuum generation in a photonic-crystal fibre pumped with 200-fs pulses at 850 nm and having 6-kW peak power.
Figure 2: Radiation trapping by a soliton.
Figure 3: Effective potential and quasi-trapped states.
Figure 4: An example of balls in a moving elevator without gravity can be used to understand trapping of the blue radiation.
Figure 5: The field at the short-wavelength edge of the supercontinuum can be represented as a superposition of the modes of the potential induced by the accelerating soliton (Fig.  3).

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ranka, J. K., Windeler, R. S. & Stentz, A. J. Visible continuum generation in air–silica microstructure optical fibers with anomalous dispersion at 800 nm. Opt. Lett. 25, 25–27 (2000).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  2. Dudley, J. M., Genty, G. & Coen, S. Supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fiber. Rev. Mod. Phys. 78, 1135–1184 (2006).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  3. Holzwarth, R. et al. Optical frequency synthesizer for precision spectroscopy. Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 002264 (2000).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Smirnov, S. et al. Optical spectral broadening and supercontinuum generation in telecom applications. Opt. Fiber Technol. 12, 122–147 (2006).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  5. Bassi, A. et al. Feasibility of white-light time-resolved optical mammography. J. Biomed. Opt. 11, 054035 (2006).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Courvoisier, C. et al. Broadband supercontinuum in a microchip-laser-pumped conventional fiber: Toward biomedical applications. Laser Phys. 14, 507–514 (2004).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Herrmann, J. et al. Experimental evidence for supercontinuum generation by fission of higher-order solitons in photonic fibers. Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 173901 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Skryabin, D. V. & Yulin, A. V. Theory of generation of new frequencies by mixing of solitons and dispersive waves in optical fibers. Phys. Rev. E 72, 016619 (2005).

    Article  ADS  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Gorbach, A. V., Skryabin D. V., Stone, J. M. & Knight, J. C. Four-wave mixing of solitons with radiation and quasi-nondispersive wave packets at the short-wavelength edge of a supercontinuum. Opt. Express 14, 9854–9863 (2006).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  10. Wadsworth, W. et al. Supercontinuum and four-wave mixing with Q-switched pulses in endlessly single-mode photonic crystal fibres. Opt. Express 12, 299–309 (2004).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  11. Efimov, A. et al. Time-spectrally-resolved ultrafast nonlinear dynamics in small-core photonic crystal fibers: Experiment and modelling. Opt. Express 12, 6498–6507 (2004).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  12. Liu, X. et al. Soliton self-frequency shift in a short tapered air-silica microstructure fiber. Opt. Lett. 26, 358–360 (2001).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  13. Skryabin, D. V., Luan, F., Knight, J. C. & Russell, P.St.J. Soliton self-frequency shift cancelation in photonic crystal fibers. Science 301, 1705–1708 (2003).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  14. Cristiani, I., Tediosi, R., Tartara, L. & Degiorgio V. Dispersive wave generation by solitons in microstructured optical fibers. Opt. Express 12, 124–135 (2004).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  15. Tomlinson, W. J., Stolen, R. H. & Johnson, A. M. Optical wave breaking of pulses in nonlinear optical fibers. Opt. Lett. 10, 457–459 (1985).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  16. Champert, P. A., Popov, S. V. & Taylor, J. R. Generation of multiwatt, broadband continua in holey fibers. Opt. Lett. 27, 122–124 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  17. Agrawal, G. P. Nonlinear Fiber Optics (Academic Press, San Diego, 2001).

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  18. Gagnon, L. & Belanger, P. A. Soliton self-frequency shift versus Galilean-like symmetry. Opt. Lett. 15, 466–468 (1990).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  19. Hori, T., Nishizawa, N., Goto, T. & Yoshida, M. Experimental and numerical analysis of widely broadened supercontinuum generation in highly nonlinear dispersion-shifted fiber with a femtosecond pulse. J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 21, 1969–1980 (2004).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  20. Genty, G., Lehtonen, M. & Ludvigsen, H. Effect of cross-phase modulation on supercontinuum generated in microstructured fibers with sub-30 fs pulses. Opt. Express 12, 4614–4624 (2004);

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  21. Genty, G., Lehtonen, M. & Ludvigsen, H. Route to broadband blue-light generation in microstructured fibers. Opt. Lett. 30, 756–758 (2005).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  22. Nishizawa, N. & Goto, T. Pulse trapping by ultrashort soliton pulses in optical fibers across zero-dispersion wavelength. Opt. Lett. 27, 152–154 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  23. Nishizawa, N. & Goto, T. Characteristics of pulse trapping by ultrashort soliton pulse in optical fibers across zero-dispersion wavelength. Opt. Express 10, 1151–1160 (2002).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  24. Bongs, K. et al. Coherent evolution of bouncing Bose–Einstein condensates. Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3577–3580 (1999).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The authors acknowledge useful remarks from C. Benton.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to D. V. Skryabin.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Gorbach, A., Skryabin, D. Light trapping in gravity-like potentials and expansion of supercontinuum spectra in photonic-crystal fibres. Nature Photon 1, 653–657 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.202

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.202

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing