Detailed characterization of CW- and pulsed-pump four-wave mixing in highly nonlinear fibers.

We present a quantitative comparison of continuous-wave- (CW) and pulsed-pump four-wave mixing (FWM) in commercially available highly nonlinear fibers (HNLFs), and suggest properties for which the CW- and pulsed-pump FWM bandwidths are limited in practice. The CW- and pulsed-pump parametric gain is characterized experimentally for several HNLFs with various dispersion properties, including zero-dispersion wavelength fluctuations, and the results are interpreted in conjunction with detailed numerical simulations. It is found that a low third-order dispersion (TOD) is essential for the pulsed-pump FWM bandwidth. However, an inverse scaling of the TOD with the dispersion fluctuations leads to different CW-optimized fibers, which depend only on the even dispersion orders.