Noise Evolution in All-Normal Dispersion Supercontinuum Generation

Femtosecond pumped supercontinuum (SC) generation in all-normal dispersion (ANDi) fiber has recently emerged as a method to obtain broadband fields which can theoretically maintain their temporal coherence completely. Self-phase modulation and the optical wave breaking are the dominant nonlinear effects in this regime, and are both known to be highly coherent. This gives such systems potential in fields including optical coherence tomography, optical metrology and spectroscopy [1]. This coherence can be experimentally measured in the comparative figure of relative intensity noise (RIN), but in prior preliminary numerical studies, only the one photon per mode noise has typically been included in the input signal when attempting to determine the RIN limits of these potentially ultra-low noise SC sources. In this study, we include realistic technical noise sources such as amplitude noise and pulse duration noise, and provide detailed numerical analysis indicating that RIN evolves in unique ways inside fs pumped ANDI SC.