On the spectral dynamics of noise-seeded modulation instability in optical fibers

"We revisit modulation instability in optical fibers, including all relevant effects, such as higher-order dispersion terms, self-steepening, and the Raman response. Our analysis allows us to calculate the spectral evolution of a small perturbation to a continuous pump, and thus obtain an analytical expression for the small-signal spectral dynamics, showing excellent agreement with numerical simulations. We apply the expression for the spectral evolution to the case of white Gaussian noise and calculate some relevant metrics of the resulting signal, such as its coherence and signal-to-noise ratio. These calculations might shed some light on the nonlinear phenomena of supercontinuum generation."