that lead to the soliton fission mechanism. Pumping in the normal dispersion regime The two regimes outlined above assume that the pump is in the anomalous dispersion region. It is possible to create supercontinua in the normal region and in fact many of the early results discussed in the historical overview were pumped in the normal dispersion regime. If the input pulses are short enough then self-phase modulation can lead to significant broadening which is temporally coherent. However, if the pulses are not ultra-short then stimulated-Raman scattering tends to dominate and typically a series of cascaded discrete Stokes lines will appear until the zero dispersion wavelength is reached. At this point a soliton Raman continuum may form. As pumping in the anomalous is much more efficient for continuum generation, the majority of modern sources avoiding pumping in the normal dispersion regime. References External links Supercontinuum on the Encyclopedia of laser physics and technology, by Rüdiger Paschotta Supercontinuum generation in silicon and how to overcome the problem with two photon absorption and free carrier absorption Nonlinear optics Articles containing video clips Laser science