All-fiber Supercontinuum Source Research Articles

High average power, strictly all-fiber supercontinuum source with good beam quality

A 1.05 μm picosecond pulsed fiber master oscillator power amplifier system delivering an average power of over 100 W was used to pump a 5 m long commercially available photonic crystal fiber and a 49.8 W supercontinuum spanning from around 500 nm to above 1700 nm was generated. Strictly single mode operation of the all-fiber supercontinuum source across the whole spectral range was verified through the quantitative measurement of the beam quality.

7 W all-fiber supercontinuum source

Combine a section of photonic crystal fiber and a picosecond fiber laser to realize an all-fiber supercontinuum source. The picosecond laser exhibits 20 W average output power, 14 ps pulse duration at 480MHz repetition rate. Approximately 7 W supercontinuum with over 1100 nm spectral range is obtained with an optical-optical conversion efficiency of 34%. Further improvements for higher average power are discussed in this paper.

All-fiber supercontinuum source based on a mode-locked ytterbium laser with dispersion compensation by linearly chirped Bragg grating

We demonstrate an all-fiber picosecond soliton laser with dispersion management performed by a chirped Bragg grating that generates ~1.6 ps pulses representing the shortest pulsewidth reported to date using this technology. The large anomalous dispersion provided by the grating allows building of a long-length cavity laser with an extremely low fundamental repetition rate of 2.6 MHz. This source allows us to use an original approach for producing energetic pulses that after boosting in a medium power core-pumped amplifier produce an octave-spanning supercontinuum radiation in a nonlinear photonic crystal fiber.

Optimized All-Fiber Supercontinuum Source at 1.3 $\mu \hbox{m}$ Generated in a Stepwise Dispersion-Decreasing-Fiber Arrangement

In this paper, the generation of a continuous-wave (CW)-pumped supercontinuum (SC) source at 1.3 mum is described. The device makes use of a tunable Yb-doped fiber laser, a cascade of fiber Bragg grating mirrors, and a concatenation of standard silica fibers with stepwise decreasing dispersion. It is shown that the dispersion-decreasing-fiber set enhances the width of the generated SC, since it favors the fission of the CW input into high-order solitons. The generated SC spans from 1280 to 1513 nm, shows an average output power of 1.34 W, and exhibits >0-dBm/nm spectral density of over 200 nm.

2 W/nm peak-power all-fiber supercontinuum source and its application to the characterization of periodically poled non-linear crystals

We demonstrate a uniform high spectral brightness and peak power density all-fiber supercontinuum source. The source consists of a nanosecond Ytterbium fiber laser and an optimal length PCF producing a continuum with a peak power density of 2W/nm and less than 5dB of spectral variation between 590 and 1500nm. The Watt level per nm peak power density enables the use of such sources for the characterization of non-linear materials. Application of the source is demonstrated with the characterization of several periodically poled crystals.

High power, single mode, all-fiber source of femtosecond pulses at 1550 nm and its use in supercontinuum generation

We present a source of high power femtosecond pulses at 1550 nm with compressed pulses at the end of a single mode fiber (SMF) pigtail. The system generates 34 femtosecond pulses at a repetition rate of 46 MHz, with average powers greater than 400 mW. The pulses are generated in a passively modelocked, erbium-doped fiber laser, and amplified in a short, erbium-doped fiber amplifier. The output of the fiber amplifier consists of highly chirped picosecond pulses. These picosecond pulses are then compressed in standard single mode fiber. While the compressed pulses in the SMF pigtail do show a low pedestal that could be avoided with the use of bulk-optic compression, the desire to compress the pulses in SMF is motivated by the ability to splice the single mode fiber to a nonlinear fiber, for continuum generation applications. We demonstrate that with highly nonlinear dispersion shifted fiber (HNLF) fusion spliced directly to the amplifier output, we generate a supercontinuum spectrum that spans more than an octave, with an average power 400 mW. Such a high power, all-fiber supercontinuum source has many important applications including frequency metrology and bio-medical imaging.

Cross-coherence measurements of supercontinua generated in highly-nonlinear, dispersion shifted fiber at 1550 nm

We present measurements of cross-coherence between independent supercontinua, generated at 1550 nm. An all-fiber supercontinuum source, consisting of a femtosecond fiber laser, fiber amplifier, and highlynonlinear dispersion shifted fiber is characterized. Supercontinua generated from both 2 picosecond and 188 femtosecond pump pulses are considered. The continua generated with picosecond pulses show a degradation in coherence as the pump power is increased, whereas a high degree of cross-coherence over a broad wavelength range can be maintained when femtosecond pulses are used.

All-fiber, octave-spanning supercontinuum.

We present an all-fiber supercontinuum source based on a passively mode-locked erbium fiber laser and a small-effective-area, germanium-doped silica fiber. The parallels between this system and the continuum generated in microstructured fibers with 800-nm pulses are discussed, and the role of dispersion is investigated experimentally. We construct a hybrid fiber by fusion splicing lengths of different-dispersion fiber together, generating more than an octave of bandwidth.