Efficient infrared-to-blue conversion in the propagation of ultrashort pulses in a microstructured fiber

We describe a detailed experimental investigation of the nonlinear propagation of ultrashort pulses in a microstructured fiber performed by varying input wavelength and pulse duration. Our attention is focused on soliton dynamics as it has been recently shown that a fundamental role in the supercontinuum generation near the zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) is played by the fission of higher-order solitons into red-shifted fundamental solitons and blue-shifted dispersion waves. We used 200 fs and 1.3 ps pulses tuned in the wavelength range 700-900 nm. The first set of measurements was carried out with femtosecond pulses and a 40-cm fiber span. We repeated our experiment by using picosecond pulses and 95 cm long fibre because of a longer dispersion length.