Solitary pulse propagation and soliton-induced supercontinuum generation in silica glasses containing silver...

We study solitary pulse propagation in the normal dispersion region in glasses containing silver nanoparticles with a self-defocusing nonlinearity and predict that, despite high plasmonic loss, pulse propagation without significant distortion over five soliton periods can be achieved in such materials. As an application, we study low-threshold soliton-induced supercontinuum generation and predict more than octave-spanning spectral broadening by femtosecond pulses with an intensity in the range of hundreds of GW/cm(2).