Experimental characterization of optical rogue waves in the femtosecond regime

In this paper, we report experiments showing that such rogue soliton events can be observed under more general conditions and can be detected using a more straightforward direct detection setup. We launch 300 fs pulses with 5 kW peak power from an 80 MHz repetition rate Ti:Sapphire laser into an 8 m long photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with zero- dispersion at 1040 nm. To investigate the statistical properties of the supercontinuum (SC) generation, we use a long-pass filter to select long wavelength spectral structure, but rather than use photonic time stretching to measure pulse intensity statistics. The slow response time of the photodiode yields a time series where peak height is proportional to the integrated energy of the long wavelength filtered SC.