Supercontinuum generation and nonlinear pulse propagation in photonic crystal fiber: influence of the frequency-dependent effective mode area

Numerical simulations are used to study the effect of the frequency dependence of the effective mode area in photonic crystal fiber on supercontinuum generation. We quantify how the frequency dependence of the effective area influences the propagation characteristics through a modified optical shock term and identify the major consequence as a reduction in the extreme long-wavelength edge of the supercontinuum spectrum. Our results show that, for the parameter regimes used in many previous supercontinuum generation experiments using near-infrared femtosecond pump sources around 800 nm, this effect would be expected to be negligible. However, for pumps in the 1000–1500 nm range, the inclusion of this effect would be expected to be crucial for accurate comparison of simulations with experiment.