Broadband supercontinuum generation based on filled structural photonic crystal fibers with low incident optical power

Abstract

Highly nonlinear photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) can be used as a kind of new ways to realize the supercontinuum generation because of their highly nonlinear effects. Based on a type of material-filled method and structure, novel highly nonlinear PCFs are proposed to compare with the conventional highly nonlinear fiber for supercontinuum generation in this manuscript. The nonlinear coefficient and supercontinuum spectra varying with different parameters such as the hole-diameter, the hole-pitch and the refractive index of the filled material are investigated respectively and analyzed numerically. Even if lower incident optical power is used on the designed PCFs than that on the conventional fiber and the previous proposed PCFs, broadband supercontinuum can still be obtained easily from highly nonlinear effects. The results demonstrate that it is possible for this kind of novel PCFs to achieve the maximum 450 nm supercontinuum spectra, even though it is only 50-cm-long fiber and pumped by substantially lower incident optical power of 1.5 W near the wavelength of 1.55 µm.