Four-wave mixing instabilities in tapered and photonic crystal fibers

We present an analytical study of four-wave mixing instabilities in tapered fibers and photonic crystal fibers. Our approach avoids the use of Taylor expansion for the linear susceptibility and the slowly-varying envelope approximation. This allows us to describe the generation of sidebands strongly detuned from the pump wave with simultaneous account for the entire dispersion characteristic of a fiber, which is found to be important for describing properly the key role of the parametric instabilities in the supercontinuum generation in these kind of fibers.