continua mostly in the visible region. Self-phase modulation was normally used to explain the processes although from the mid-1980s other explanations were offered, including second harmonic generation cross-phase modulation and induced phase modulation. Indeed, efforts were made to explain why self-phase modulation might well result in much broader continua, mostly through modifications to theory by including factors such as a slowly varying amplitude envelope amongst others. In 1987 Gomes et al. reported cascaded stimulated Raman scattering in a single mode phosphosilicate based fibre. They pumped the fibre with a Q-switched and mode-locked Nd:YAG, which produced 130 ps pulses with 700 kW peak power. They launched up to 56 kW into the fibre and as a result of the phosphorus achieved a much broader and flatter continuum than had been achieved to that point with silica fibre. A year later Gouveia-Neto et al. from the same group published a paper describing the formation and propagation of soliton waves from modulation instability. They used a 1.32 μm Nd:YAG laser which produced 100 ps pulses with 200 W peak power to pump 500 m of single mode fibre with a 7 μm core diameter. The zero dispersion wavelength of the fibre was at 1.30 μm, placing the pump just inside the anomalous dispersion regime. They noted pulses emerging with durations of less than 500 fs (solitons) and as they increased the pump power a continuum was formed stretching from 1.3 to 1.5 μm. The 1990s Gross et al. in 1992 published a paper modelling the formation of supercontinua (in the anomalous group velocity dispersion region) when generated by femtosecond pulses in fibre. It was easily the most complete model, to that date, with fundamental solitons and soliton self-frequency shift emerging as solutions to the equations. The applicability of supercontinua for use in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems for optical communications was investigated heavily during the 1990s. In 1993 Morioka et al. reported a 100 wavelength channel multiplexing scheme which simultaneously produced one hundred 10 ps pulses in the 1.224-1.394 μm spectra region with a 1.9 nm spectral spacing. They produced a supercontinuum using a Nd:YLF pump centred on 1.314 μm which was mode-locked to produce 7.6 ps pulses. They then filtered the resulting continuum with a birefringent fibre to generate the channels. Morioka and Mori continued development of telecommunications technologies utilising supercontinuum generation throughout the 1990s up to the present day. Their research