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Supercontinuum
About: Supercontinuum is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7071 publications have been published within this topic receiving 127671 citations.
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TL;DR: The state of the art of ultrafast Er:fiber technology is reviewed in this article, where coherent and tailored supercontinuum generation in highly nonlinear germanosilicate fibers is discussed.
Abstract: The state of the art of ultrafast Er:fiber technology is reviewed. Such lasers are increasingly used for generation of ultrabroadband and widely tunable pulse trains. Er:fiber sources prove to be flexible, compact and robust with important applications in fundamental and interdisciplinary sciences. After a short overview of different oscillator and amplifier designs the discussion focuses on coherent and tailored supercontinuum generation in highly nonlinear germanosilicate fibers. This approach enables a tuning range spanning from the visible to the mid infrared, synthesis of single-cycle light pulses and passive locking of the carrier-envelope phase.
106 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the transition between coherent and noise-seeded incoherent continuum generation in all-normal dispersion (ANDi) fibers and showed that highly coherent supercontinua with spectral bandwidths of one octave can be generated with long pump pulses of up to 1.5 ps duration.
Abstract: We study the largely unexplored transition between coherent and noise-seeded incoherent continuum generation in all-normal dispersion (ANDi) fibers and show that highly coherent supercontinua with spectral bandwidths of one octave can be generated with long pump pulses of up to 1.5 ps duration, corresponding to soliton orders of up to N=600. In terms of N, this corresponds to an approximately 50 times increase of the coherent regime compared to anomalous dispersion pumping. In the transition region between coherent and incoherent spectral broadening, we observe the manifestation of nonlinear phenomena that we term incoherent cloud formation and incoherent optical wave breaking, which lead to a gradual or instantaneous coherence collapse of supercontimuum (SC) spectral components, respectively. The role played by stimulated Raman scattering and parametric four-wave mixing during SC generation in ANDi fibers is shown to be more extensive than previously recognized: their nonlinear coupling contributes to the suppression of incoherent dynamics at short pump pulse durations, while it is responsible for non-phase-matched parametric amplification of noise observed in the long pulse regime. We further discuss the dependence of SC coherence on fiber design, and present basic experimental verifications for our findings using single-shot detection of SC spectra generated by picosecond pulses. This work outlines both the further potential as well as the limitations of broadband coherent light source development for applications such as metrology, nonlinear imaging, and ultrafast photonics, among others.
105 citations
TL;DR: A strong diameter-dependence of the spectral broadening of the supercontinuum generated by femtosecond laser pulses in silica fiber tapers can be attributed to the fiber's diameter-dependent dispersion and nonlinearity.
Abstract: Silica nanowires provide strong mode confinement in a cylindrical silica-core/air-cladding geometry and serve a model system for studying nonlinear propagation of short optical pulses inside fibers. We report on the fiber diameter dependence of the supercontinuum generated by femtosecond laser pulses in silica fiber tapers with average diameters in the range of 200 nm to 1200 nm. We observe a strong diameter-dependence of the spectral broadening, which can be attributed to the fiber's diameter-dependent dispersion and nonlinearity. The short interaction length (less than 20 mm) and the low energy threshold for supercontinuum generation (about 1 nJ) make tapered fibers with diameters between 400 nm and 800 nm an ideal source of coherent white-light source in nanophotonics.
105 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the state-of-the-art femto-second supercontinuum generation in various transparent solid-state media, ranging from widebandgap dielectrics to semiconductor materials and in various parts of the optical spectrum, from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared spectral range, is presented.
Abstract: Nonlinear propagation of intense femtosecond laser pulses in bulk transparent media leads to a specific propagation regime, termed femtosecond filamentation, which in turn produces dramatic spectral broadening, or super-broadening, termed supercontinuum generation. Femtosecond supercontinuum generation in transparent solids represents a compact, efficient and alignment-insensitive technique for generation of coherent broadband radiation at various parts of the optical spectrum, which finds numerous applications in diverse fields of modern ultrafast science. During recent years, this research field has reached a high level of maturity, both in understanding of the underlying physics and in achievement of exciting practical results. In this paper we overview the state-of-the-art femto-second supercontinuum generation in various transparent solid-state media, ranging from wide-bandgap dielectrics to semiconductor materials and in various parts of the optical spectrum, from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared spectral range. A particular emphasis is given to the most recent experimental developments: multioctave supercon-tinuum generation with pumping in the mid-infrared spectral range, spectral control, power and energy scaling of broadband radiation and the development of simple, flexible and robust pulse compression techniques, which deliver few optical cycle pulses and which could be readily implemented in a variety of modern ultrafast laser systems.
105 citations
TL;DR: A 10-GHz ultra-broadband flat-topped optical frequency comb (> 3.64-THz or 28 nm bandwidth with ~365 spectral lines within 3.5-dB power variation) covering the entire C-band is presented.
Abstract: The generation of high-repetition-rate optical frequency combs with an ultra-broad, coherent and smooth spectrum is important for many applications in optical communications, radio-frequency photonics and optical arbitrary waveform generation. Usually, nonlinear broadening techniques of comb-based sources do not provide the required flatness over the whole available bandwidth. Here we present a 10-GHz ultra-broadband flat-topped optical frequency comb (> 3.64-THz or 28 nm bandwidth with ~365 spectral lines within 3.5-dB power variation) covering the entire C-band. The key enabling point is the development of a pre-shaping-free directly generated Gaussian comb-based 10-GHz pulse train to seed a highly nonlinear fiber with normal dispersion profile. The combination of the temporal characteristics of the seed pulses with the nonlinear device allows the pulses to enter into the optical wave-breaking regime, thus achieving a smooth flat-topped comb spectral envelope. To further illustrate the high spectral coherence of the comb, we demonstrate high-quality pedestal-free short pulse compression to the transform-limited duration.
105 citations