Researchers at the University of Bath claim to have explained the mechanism enabling supercontinuum generation, the conversion of ultrashort pulses into broad spectra of light in photonic crystal fibers.

Supercontinuum generation has helped to enable optical clocks that are accurate to within a second every million years, for which Roy Glauber, John Hall, and Theodor Hansch received the Nobel Prize in 2005. Since then, many researchers have generated supercontinua in optical fibers for coherence tomography, metrology and biomedical applications, despite the fact that the mechanism behind it has remained obscure.