3D Plot of Evolution of Optical Pulse in the Fiber

The layout consists of a pulse generator (mode-locked laser), single-mode lossless fiber, and waveform and spectrum analyzers. The fiber is lossless to demonstrate ideal soliton propagation, the length of the fiber is set to one soliton period, and the dispersion- and nonlinearity-related parameters are set as described in the application note documentation, which you can access in the Help > Application Notes menu in the OptSim GUI.

A parametric scan is set up to sweep over the fiber length from zero to the soliton period, in steps of 10% of the soliton period.

When the simulation is done, double-clicking on the "fiber_out1" signal analyzer displays a list of ten plots, each corresponding to one of the scan steps:

Let’s open the first plot (you can open any) from the above list:

Click the View Editor button in the plot window to display the WinPLOT window.

There is only one plot file, named "lstmpfiber_out1step1_mag.sig," and we need to combine all the remaining nine files so that we can have a single graph showing all ten individual plots.

In the WinPLOT window, click the View Plot button to return to the plot window.

However, this is not yet a 3D plot. To generate a 3D plot in the plot window, choose the Options 3D > Data Display > 3D Slices menu.

The plot now looks like the following figure:

This is still not the plot we want, because (a) there’s no Z-axis title, (b) the Y-axis label needs modification, and (c) we would like to set the X-axis scale to nanoseconds. These changes require opening the WinPLOT editor by clicking the View Editor button and making command line changes.

The command line changes require some experience with WinPLOT, the plotting tool used by the blockmode engine of OptSim, OptSim Circuit and ModeSYS™. Chapter 2 of the WinPLOT manual provides an overview of the commands, and Chapter 3 describes them in detail.

For our purposes, we need to use the following commands:

/zl"Z/Z_0" adds the Z-axis title. The underscore in Z_0 will make "0" appear as a subscript to Z, as in Z₀.

/yl"Magnitude (au)" modifies the Y-axis title.

/sx1e9 scales the X-axis so that the time scale is in nanoseconds.

/xl"Time (ns)" applies a new label to the X-axis.

With these changes, the WinPLOT window looks like the following figure:

In order to view the final plot, click View Plot, and resize the plot window if necessary using the mouse. The final plot showing evolution of soliton pulse in the fiber looks like the following figure: