Three octave spanning supercontinuum by red-shifted dispersive wave in photonic crystal fibers

TL;DR

This paper designs a photonic crystal fiber capable of generating a three octave spanning supercontinuum from 900 to 7200 nm using 50 fs pulses, leveraging nonlinear effects like four-wave mixing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fiber design with optimized dispersion and nonlinear properties for broad supercontinuum generation through numerical simulation.

Findings

Achieved three octave supercontinuum from 900 to 7200 nm.

Demonstrated the role of nonlinear effects in spectral broadening.

Optimized fiber parameters for supercontinuum generation.

Abstract

This paper presents a three layer index guided lead silicate (SF57) photonic crystal fiber which simultaneously promises to yield large effective optical nonlinear coefficient and low anomalous dispersion that makes it suitable for supercontinuum generation. At an operating wavelength 1550 nm, the typical optimized value of anomalous dispersion and effective nonlinear coefficient turns out to be ~4 ps/km/nm and ~1078 W^(-1) km^(-1), respectively. Through numerical simulation it is realized that the designed fiber promises to exhibit three octave spanning supercontinuum from 900 to 7200 nm by using 50 fs sech optical pulses of 5 kW peak power. Due to the cross-phase modulation and four-wave mixing processes, a long range of red-shifted dispersive wave generated, which assist to achieve such large broadening. In addition, we have investigated the compatibility of supercontinuum generation with input pulse peak power increment and briefly discussed the impact of nonlinear processes on supercontinuum generation.