Effects of Nonlinear Chirp on the Self-Phase Modulation of Ultrashort Optical Pulses

Abstract

In this article, we analytically investigate the spectral broadening by self-phase modulation of strongly chirped optical pulses. The dispersion due to the nonlinear optical process is expressed as functions of a linear and a nonlinear initial chirp. As a result, it is found that the third-order dispersion strongly depends on the initial linear chirp and the nonlinearity for self-phase modulation.

Keywords

• ultrashort optical pulse
• self-phase modulation
• nonlinear chirp