Exploiting wave breaking asymmetry for broadband cascaded ANDi-supercontinuum generation

We present what we believe to be a novel way of utilizing an all-normal dispersion fiber cascade in order to achieve a substantial increase in spectral width for a fixed input pulse, as compared to spectral widths attainable in the individual fibers. We numerically show how this increased spectral width arises due to an asymmetry exhibited by the wave breaking (OWB), allowing for the utilization of the low dispersion regions of both adopted fibers. We investigate how such a cascade may utilize the pulse length as a tunable parameter in order to avoid unrealistically short fiber lengths, while remaining in the low-noise regime. In addition, we show how the OWB asymmetry varies with input peak power and pulse length and how this affects the dynamics of the cascade. Finally, we show how the output of an optimal cascade configuration maintains high coherence and low noise.