Investigation and design rules of supercontinuum sources for WDM applications

We investigate supercontinuum generation (SC) in normal dispersion fiber in order to assess the feasibility of WDM transmitters based on SC sources. The interest of this case lies in its relative simplicity, and in the high coherence of the SC spectrum that is obtained through this process. We demonstrate that seed pulse shape influences both SC spectrum flatness and its noise characteristics. Simple design rules for the maximum spectrum magnification and for the corresponding fiber length are proposed. We show numerically and experimentally that a proper design can keep the amplitude noise of the SC spectrum comparable with the amplitude noise of the seed pulse.