Supercontinuum Generation in Photonic-Crystal Fiber

Photonic-crystal fibers confine light to a core only a couple of microns wide, so even modest pulse energies reach nonlinear intensities. This simulator numerically integrates the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a real split-step Fourier solver, launching a higher-order soliton (order N) into a fiber with tunable third-order dispersion. As the pulse propagates, it fissions into fundamental solitons and a dispersive wave that walk off from one another in time, spreading the initially narrowband pump spectrum into a broadband supercontinuum — the same physical mechanism behind photonic-crystal-fiber white-light sources used in optical coherence tomography and frequency-comb metrology. Drag the soliton-order, dispersion and propagation-distance controls to watch the spectrum evolve in real time, with live readouts for spectral bandwidth, peak power and physical propagation distance.