Supercontinuum short optical pulse generation and its application to gain dynamics measurements of SOAs

Supercontinuum (SC) optical pulses at 1.5 /spl mu/m region with a spectral width of about 300 nm have been generated. By compensation of the up-chirp of the SC pulses, the pulse width has been compressed to 60 fs. We have measured the gain dynamics of wide gain-bandwidth semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) using the two-color pump-probe technique with a few hundred-femtosecond optical pulses which were generated from the compressed SC optical pulses.