Coherent supercontinuum generation in tellurite glass regular lattice photonic crystal fibers

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and experimental demonstration of highly nonlinear tellurite glass photonic crystal fibers with engineered normal dispersion for coherent supercontinuum generation using a low-power femtosecond laser.

Contribution

It introduces a novel microstructured fiber with high nonlinearity and tailored dispersion, enabling supercontinuum generation at significantly lower peak powers than previous designs.

Findings

Achieved flat all-normal dispersion profiles from -10 to -50 ps/nm/km over 1500-2400 nm

Generated supercontinuum spectra spanning 1100-2600 nm with a 90 fs, 40 kW laser

First engineered microstructured fiber enabling supercontinuum with low peak power laser

Abstract

We report on designing, fabrication and experimental characterization of highly nonlinear, tellurite glass photonic crystal fibers with engineered normal dispersion characteristics for coherent supercontinuum generation. Effectively single mode, air-hole lattice fibers, with measured, all-normal dispersion profiles as flat as -10 to -50 ps/mn/km over 1500-2400 nm wavelengths are developed and investigated. Supercontinuum spectra are measured for these fibers, with a spectral width covering 1100-2600 nm wavelengths under pumping with a robust, fixed-wavelength erbium fiber-based femtosecond laser, delivering 90 fs pulses, centered at 1560 nm with peak power below 40 kW. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first engineered microstructured fiber, which due to its high nonlinearity, enables a self-phase modulation and optical wave breaking-based supercontinuum pumped with a turn-key, 40 kW femtosecond laser at spectral widths obtainable with previous all-normal dispersion fiber designs only under pumping with systems delivering peak power in the MW range.