Supercontinuum spectrum control in microstructure fibers by initial chirp management

Experiments and numerical simulation were performed for verification of the role of femtosecond pulse chirp for supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fiber. We demonstrate that injection of high power negatively chirped pulses near zero dispersion point brings an advantage over positively chirped pulses resulting in additional collision between solitons and in development of a significantly broader spectrum. Coupling between Raman induced solitons and dispersive waves generated by higher order dispersion was proven to be the key mechanism behind the results.