Understanding the fission of higher-order solitons. Applications to the supercontinuum generation, pulse compression and frequency conversion.

A detailed study of the N-soliton fission mechanism in optical fibers with strong higher order dispersion reveals a mechanism of step-like ejections of fundamental quasi-solitons out of the parential N-soliton temporal slot. This mechanism, valid also in presence of high order nonlinear effect such as Raman and selfsteepening governs the dynamics of N-soliton decomposition into individual frequency shifted solitons and dispersive waves and the resulting supercontinuum generation. Possibility to control the temporal compression/power enhancement of fission generated fundamental solitons will be discussed. Solitonic cavities created by several individual fundamental quasi-solitons and trapped dispersive waves in between will be demonstrated as a phenomenon occurring just after the N-soliton fission with corresponding projection of these light structure to an overall supercontinuum spectrum.