Supercontinuum generation based on all-normal-dispersion Yb-doped fiber laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization rotation: Influence of seed's output port

Abstract

All-normal-dispersion (ANDi) mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser is a promising seed source for supercontinuum (SC) generation, due to its compact structure and broadband output. The influences of output ports of the ANDi laser mode-locked by nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR), on the generated SC are investigated. Two output ports of ANDi laser are considered, one of which is the conventional nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) port and the other is extracted from a coupler after the NPR port. It is found that, the SC originated from the coupler port is much broader than that from the NPR port, which is validated by lots of experiments with different output parameters. Furthermore, the conclusion is verified and generalized to general ANDi lasers by numerical simulations, because the output pulse from coupler port could be cleaner than that from NPR port. Besides, there are no significant differences in the phase coherence and temporal stability between the SCs generated from both ports. Hence for the SC generation based on ANDi laser, it is preferred to use the pulse of coupler port (i.e. pulse after NPR port) serving as the seed source.