Abstract
We demonstrate an all-fiber high-power linearly polarized supercontinuum source with polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fibers (PM-PCFs) as the nonlinear medium. The source exhibits an average output power of 3.8 W with a flat spectrum from 480 nm to 2100 nm at the $-$10 dB level, except for the residual pump peak. The polarization extinction ratio (PER) is measured to be greater than 20 dB at selected sample wavelength points (532 nm, 1064 nm and 1550 nm) at the highest pump power level and greater than 20 dB at all wavelengths from 800 nm to 1500 nm at the low pump power level. We also experimentally study the spectral properties when the pump light propagates along different axes of the PM-PCF. The results show that propagating parallel to the slow axis enables a broader spectrum in the PM-PCF in this case, probably due to matching of the dispersion properties with the pump light, which is qualitatively in accordance with the numerical simulation. To our best knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a watt-level linearly polarized supercontinuum source generated from PM-PCFs in an all-fiber structure.
Highlights
Supercontinuum (SC) fiber sources have been a fruitful research area in recent years, and have the beneficial properties of a broadband spectrum, good spatial coherence and a compact structure for a wide range of applications, such as hyperspectral lidar, optical coherence tomography, optical frequency metrology, and white-light trapping[1,2,3,4,5,6]
The polarization extinction ratio (PER) is measured to be greater than 20 dB at selected sample wavelength points (532 nm, 1064 nm and 1550 nm) at the highest pump power level and greater than 20 dB at all wavelengths from 800 nm to 1500 nm at a low pump power level
The center wavelength of the pump source is 1064 nm, which is located in the normal group velocity dispersion (GVD) regime of the polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fibers (PM-photonic crystal fibers (PCFs)) and relatively near the zerodispersion wavelength (ZDW)
Summary
Supercontinuum (SC) fiber sources have been a fruitful research area in recent years, and have the beneficial properties of a broadband spectrum, good spatial coherence and a compact structure for a wide range of applications, such as hyperspectral lidar, optical coherence tomography, optical frequency metrology, and white-light trapping[1,2,3,4,5,6]. The UV to near-IR region is important in biomedical imaging and fluorescence lifetime imaging fields[16, 17] These applications always require a linearly polarized SC, whereas the generated SC is generally unpolarized. To further broaden the spectrum, highly nonlinear fibers such as PCFs have been widely used in broadband SC generation for their excellent characteristics, such as high nonlinearity and tailorable dispersion[19, 20]. Another effective way for obtaining a linearly polarized SC is using highly birefringent PCFs[21,22,23,24,25,26]. Tarnowski et al demonstrated a polarized all-normal dispersion SC generated in a birefringent silica
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