Soliton trapping and orthogonal Raman scattering in a birefringent microstructured fiber

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates soliton trapping and orthogonal Raman scattering in birefringent microstructured fibers, showing energy transfer between polarization components and implications for high polarization purity light sources.

Contribution

It presents experimental and numerical evidence of polarization-dependent soliton dynamics and Raman amplification in birefringent microstructured fibers, a novel observation.

Findings

Energy transfer between polarization components observed

Orthogonal Raman gain amplifies the transferred pulse

Group-velocity matched wavelengths for polarization components

Abstract

We report on trapped pulse generation in birefringent microstructured optical fiber. Linearly polarized fs pulses are injected into the microstructured fiber in anomalous dispersion regime. We observed experimentally that soliton pulse polarized along the fast fiber axis partially transfers its energy to the orthogonal polarization. The generated pulse is amplified through the orthogonal Raman gain. The two polarization components are located at group-velocity matched wavelengths. The experimental works are supported with numerical simulations. The obtained results are important for the light sources using self-frequency shifted solitons in applications demanding high polarization purity.