Supercontinuum generation in highly Ge-doped core Y-shaped microstructured optical fiber

Abstract

We report experimental results on supercontinuum generation in a highly Ge-doped core Y-shaped microstructured optical fiber using pump pulses of 9 ns duration at 1064 nm. The fiber is easy to fabricate due to its simple structure and shows good compatibility with standard fiber. The generation of nonlinear effects takes advantage of the large nonlinear refractive index and Raman gain of the Ge-doped core, as well as the air hole structure that surrounds the core. Although the fiber was pumped in normal dispersion and relatively far from the zero dispersion wavelength, flat and smooth supercontinuum in the fundamental mode from 550 nm to beyond 1750 nm was generated with a rather moderate value of fiber length and pump peak power product of 13 kW⋅m.