Lead silicate fiber with small dispersion and large nonlinearity at telecommunication wavelength

Broadband supercontinuum generation in lead silicate photonic crystal fibers employing optical pulses of 50 W peak power

“…The effective refractive index contrast between core and cladding with flexibility of design promise excellent optical properties like high nonlinear coefficient, zero dispersion, endless single mode propagation, high birefringence etc. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The chromatic dispersion of PCFs can be tuned by tailoring the air hole pitch, air hole diameter and their arrangement in the cladding.…”

“…The large effective optical nonlinearity can be achieved by tight mode confinement and use of glasses with greater intrinsic material nonlinear coefficient than silica. Multitudinous investigations on devices that rely on large optical nonlinearity of PCFs made of non-silica glass have been reported [8][9][10].…”

“…The SC generation in PCFs has been the subject of intense experimental and theoretical investigations during last fifteen years [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. SC generation is a complex process of spectral broadening of femtosecond, picosecond or nanosecond optical pulses, which undergo a number of nonlinear interactions such as modulation instability (MI), self-phase modulation (SPM), fourwave mixing (FWM), stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), selfsteepening or soliton fission in an optical nonlinear medium.…”

“…In addition, significantly lower refractive index of SF57 in comparison to chalcogenide and heavy metal oxide glasses enables more efficient integration with conventional optical fiber systems. A number of investigations has reported large nonlinear coefficient γ ( ) of PCFs that is made of SF57 glasses [6][7][8][9][10]13,29]. For example, Petropoulos et al [13] fabricated a small core SF57 PCF with nonlinear coefficient γ~640 W À 1 km À 1 at 1550 nm.…”

“…Leong et al [10] also reported the fabrication of these fibers with γ as high as 1860 W À 1 km À 1 at 1550 nm. Significant attention has been paid to modify the design of these fibers as well as to undertake numerical simulation with the objective of achieving high nonlinearity [6][7][8][9]29]. Numerical simulations were performed by Xing-Ping et al [6], Tiwari et al [7], Kumari et al [9], Sharma et al [8] and Agrawal et al [29], and at 1550 nm they have predicted the nonlinear coefficient of 111.5, 500, 1179, 1860 and 2150 W À 1 km À 1 , respectively.…”