Abstract

Common optical fibers are randomly birefringent, and solitons formatting and traveling in them are randomly polarized. However, it is desirable to have solitons with a well-defined polarization. With pump relatively long pulses, the nonlinear effects of modulation instability (MI) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) are dominant at the initial stage of the process of supercontinuum (SC) generation; modulation instability results in pulse breakup and formation of short pulses that evolve finally to a bunch of solitons and dispersive waves. We do the research of the polarization of solitons formed by the pulse breakup process by the effect of modulation instability with pump pulses of nanoseconds in standard fiber (SMF-28) with circular birefringence introduced by fiber twist, and the twisted fiber mitigates the random linear birefringence. In this work, we found that polarization ellipticity of solitons is distributed randomly; nevertheless, the average polarization ellipticity is closer to the circular than the polarization ellipticity of the input pulse. In the experimental setup. 200 m of SMF-28 fiber twisted by 6 turns/m was used. We used 1 ns pulse to pump the fiber. The results showed that at circular polarization of the input pulse solitons at the fiber output have polarizations close to the circular, while in the fiber without twist, the soliton polarization was random.

Keywords: fiber optic, nonlinear optics, pulse propagation and temporal solitons, birefringence and polarization, stimulated Raman scattering
