Role of pump coherence in the evolution of continuous-wave supercontinuum generation initiated by modulation instability

We report in detail, both experimentally and using numerical simulation, the efficiency of generation of supercontinua in optical fiber driven by modulation instability of a continuous-wave (CW) pump source. It is shown that the degree of pump coherence has a dramatic effect on the resulting spectral expansion and it is discussed how this can be explained by having the proper conditions for efficient modulation instability to break the CW pump light into a train of fundamental solitons that subsequently undergo self-Raman shift to longer wavelengths. It is proposed that an optimal pump bandwidth exists corresponding to the optimal degree of pump incoherence, defined as a function of the modulation instability period.