Abstract
Using the ultrafast laser inscription technique, buried channel waveguides have been fabricated in gallium lanthanum sulfide and gallium lanthanum sulfide selenide glasses to demonstrate the suitability of the materials for supercontinuum generation in the mid-IR. Supercontinuum generation was performed using 100 femtosecond pump pulses with micro-Joule pulse energies and a center wavelength of 4.6 µm, which is in the anomalous dispersion regime for these waveguides. Under such pump conditions, supercontinuum was obtained covering a 25-dB-bandwidth of up to 6.1 um with a long-wavelength edge of 8 µm. To our knowledge, this represents the broadest and the longest-wavelength IR supercontinuum generated from an ultrafast laser inscribed waveguide to date.
Highlights
The development of chip-scaled photonic devices which operate in the near to mid-IR is of interest in a wide range of fields such as sensing, medicine and astronomy [1]
Using the ultrafast laser inscription technique, buried channel waveguides have been fabricated in gallium lanthanum sulfide and gallium lanthanum sulfide selenide glasses to demonstrate the suitability of the materials for supercontinuum generation in the mid-IR
Chalcogenide glasses are an important candidate as a host material for such devices as they have broad wavelength transmission across the mid-IR and high customizability in material composition, which allows for the tailoring of material properties and rare-earth doping [2,3,4]
Summary
The development of chip-scaled photonic devices which operate in the near to mid-IR is of interest in a wide range of fields such as sensing, medicine and astronomy [1] These applications benefit from the scalability, robustness, and reduction in size that can be achieved when utilizing integrated optical systems over systems using free space optics. Making use of the high nonlinear response of GLS we have previously demonstrated supercontinuum generation (SCG) spanning 1.75-5 μm [7] This compares well with similar results in other materials using waveguides fabricated by ultrafast laser inscription [8,9].
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