Impact of modulation instability on the supercontinuum generation

We report on a numerical study of supercontinuum generation in a single-mode optical fiber. We show that the modulation instability (MI) can be responsible for the generation of ultrabroadband octave-spanning continua for pico- and subpicosecond pulses in the anomalous- as well as in the normal dispersion region. The MI turns out to dominate higher-order effects such as third- and fourth-order dispersion, self-steepening and stimulated Raman scattering.