EXPERIMENTS ON THE CO-PROPAGATION OF ULTRA-SHORT PULSES WITH CONTINUOUS-WAVE RADIATION THROUGH OPTICAL FIBERS

The superposition of a weak continuous wave to a train of ultra-short pulses propagating in an optical single-mode fibre can lead to strong interactions between the two co-propagating signals. These interaction s result in considerable modifications of the propagated pulse spectru m. A systematic investigation of the dependence of these modifications on various input signal and fibre parameters is presented. It has bee n found that cw power levels typically 10(6) times lower than the resp ective pulse peak power are strong enough to induce pronounced modific ations in the output pulse spectrum.