Abstract
We present a source of brilliant mid-infrared radiation, seamlessly covering the wavelength range between 1.33 and 18 μm (7500–555 cm−1) with three channels, employing broadband nonlinear conversion processes driven by the output of a thulium-fiber laser system. The high-average-power femtosecond frontend delivers a 50 MHz train of 250 fs pulses spectrally centered at 1.96 μm. The three parallel channels employ soliton self-compression in a fused-silica fiber, supercontinuum generation in a ZBLAN fiber, and difference-frequency generation in GaSe driven by soliton self-compressed pulses. The total output enables spectral coverage from 1.33 to 2.4 μm, from 2.4 to 5.2 μm, and from 5.2 to 18 μm with 4.5 W, 0.22 W and 0.5 W, respectively. This spatially coherent source with a footprint of less than 4 m2 exceeds the brilliance of 3rd-generation synchrotrons by more than three orders of magnitude over 90% of the bandwidth.
Highlights
Broadband light sources are an important enabling technology for the spectroscopic study of molecular vibrations, helping to classify the chemical composition and conformation of a wide range of materials [1]
The infrared molecular fingerprint region, spanning from the nearinfrared to the long-wavelength mid-infrared (MIR) (∼2–20 μm), can be used to probe a huge variety of vibrational molecular modes and overtones [3]. Such molecular resonances can provide new insights in the areas of atmospheric and trace-gas analysis [4], biomedical diagnostics [5, 6], and microscopy [7, 8]. For many applications, such as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermal radiation sources are most commonly employed for illumination
Spatial incoherence reduces the achievable brightness, despite the Watt-level average powers emitted by thermal sources
Summary
T P Butler , N Lilienfein, J Xu1, N Nagl , C Hofer1,2 , D Gerz, K F Mak, C Gaida , T Heuermann, M Gebhardt, J Limpert, F Krausz and I Pupeza. We present a source of brilliant mid-infrared radiation, seamlessly covering the wavelength range between 1.33 and 18 μm (7500–555 cm−1) with three channels, employing broadband nonlinear conversion processes driven by the output of a thulium-fiber laser system. The three parallel channels employ soliton self-compression in a fused-silica fiber, supercontinuum generation in a ZBLAN fiber, and difference-frequency generation in GaSe driven by soliton selfcompressed pulses. 5.2 μm, and from 5.2 to 18 μm with 4.5 W, 0.22 W and 0.5 W, respectively This spatially coherent source with a footprint of less than 4 m2 exceeds the brilliance of 3rd-generation synchrotrons by more than three orders of magnitude over 90% of the bandwidth
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