A low-cost CW-pumped supercontinuum source

Abstract

In order to resolve the conflict of high performance and high cost for a continuous wave (CW)-pumped supercontinuum (SC) source under low-power pumping conditions (less than ∼20 W), a cascaded-fiber configuration of a short photonic crystal fiber (PCF) and a short low-cost conventional fiber is proposed to replace long high-cost PCFs. By cascading a 60 m low-cost conventional nonlinear fiber with a 90 m PCF pumped by a 24 W CW fiber laser, a higher-quality SC with a 10 dB bandwidth of 230 nm and a 5 dB bandwidth of 176 nm is demonstrated. This SC also has a maximum output power of 13.9 W. Both the spectral performance and the output power properties for this SC source are superior to those for the SC from the 200 m high-cost PCF, and these results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in realizing a low-cost, high-quality SC source.