Midinfrared optical rogue waves in soft glass photonic crystal fiber

We investigate numerically the formation of extreme events or rogue waves in soft glass tellurite fibers and demonstrate that optical loss drastically diminishes shot-to-shot fluctuations characteristic of picosecond pumped supercontinuum (SC). When loss is neglected these fluctuations include extreme events such as formation of highly energetic pulses located at the red end of the spectrum and we obtain right-skewed heavy-tailed distributions characteristic of extreme events statistics. On the other hand, when loss is included bandwidth fluctuations follow Gaussian-like statistical distributions. Our results thus implicitly show that rogue waves will not occur in any SC spectrum that is limited by loss, such as commercial silica fiber based SC sources. © 2011 Optical Society of America.