Active reduction of fluctuations in fourth-order modulation instability
Résumé
We experimentally study the fluctuation properties of a scalar fourth-order modulation instability process obtained by pumping a photonic crystal fiber in the normal dispersion region. We observe large wavelength-dependant pulse-to-pulse fluctuations which cannot be significantly reduced by stimulating the process with a single seed. Their reduction requires two seeds slightly detuned from the maximum gain frequency in order to also stimulate the second-order modulation instability process cascaded from the fourth-order one. This concept is validated by experiments and numerical simulations.