Optical rogue waves and soliton collisions

Extensive stochastic numerical simulations are used to revisit and discuss the precise nature of “optical rogue waves” in noise-driven fiber supercontinuum generation (SC). We show that the emergence of solitons with enhanced redshift originates from the collision of two solitons with different frequencies. Our analysis further shows that these solitons do not possess a significantly higher peak power than other solitons present in the field at the fiber output. Nonetheless, the full field analysis reveals that the distribution over multiple shots of all the solitons present in a given SC still exhibits a long-tail, where the extreme-events correspond to the onset of soliton collisions. Additionally, we show that, in a fiber with two zero-dispersion wavelengths, these collision events can give rise to extreme dispersive waves in the long wavelength dispersion regime. Our results confirm the importance of collision dynamics as generators of extreme-value phenomena in a noise-driven supercontinuum context.