Supergaussian pulse distortion in single-mode fibers with arbitrary dispersion

We extend the theory to supergaussian pulses of arbitrary order with linear or edge-concentrated chirp, single or multiline sources and an arbitrary number of dispersion coefficients. The rms output width is obtained exactly from the moments of the Wigner distribution, and all the pulse moments involved reduce to finite sums of Gamma functions.

Supergaussian pulses are considerably more sensitive than Gaussian pulses to higher order dispersion and are compressed less efficiently by chirp. Near the zero-dispersion wavelength their rms width is governed by weak spectral side lobes and overestimates the broadening of the pulse energy. For pulse sequences, interference between neighboring pulses leaves all time moments unchanged when the input pulses do not overlap, but it redistributes energy locally with a visibility set by the source spectrum filtered by the pulse spectrum.