Supercontinuum generation at 1.55μm using highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber for telecommunication and medical applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present a theoretical calculation of a highly nonlinear germanium (Ge) doped photonic crystal fiber with all-normal group velocity dispersion to design a supercontinuum (SC) light source at 1.55 μm. By doping 3% higher refractive index Ge inside the host silica, the nonlinear coefficient is increased to a value as large as 60.5 W−1 km−1 at 1.55 μm. A 10 dB bandwidth of a 120 nm SC spectrum for a 2.5 ps input optical pulse and a 10 dB bandwidth of a 190 nm SC spectrum for a 1.0 ps input optical pulse have been found using the same fiber length of 200m and input optical power of 18 W. The coherent lengths of the generated SC light sources are found to be 8.8 μm for a 2.5 ps input optical pulse and 5.6 μm for a 1.0 ps input optical pulse. Therefore, the highest longitudinal resolution at 1.55 μm is found to be about 4.0 μm for biological tissues.