Analyses of coherence-maintained ultrashort optical pulse trains and supercontinuum generation in the presence of soliton-amplified spontaneous-emission interaction

Coherence degradation in the soliton pulse-compression process and supercon tinuum generation in the presence of amplified spontaneous emission are stu died with numerical simulations. We have developed a new simulation method to study the quality of a pulse train and use numerical simulations to pres ent three ways to suppress its coherence degradation. We point out that a s imple measurement of the pulse train's power spectrum does not fully repres ent the quality of the pulse train because it does not contain detailed inf ormation on noise. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America [S0740-3224(99)03811 -4].