Nondestructive distributed measurement of supercontinuum generation along highly nonlinear optical fibers

Abstract

Supercontinuum generation (SCG) in optical fibers arises from the spectral broadening of an intense light, which results from the interplay of both linear and nonlinear optical effects. In this Letter, a nondestructive optical time domain reflectometry method is proposed for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to measure the spatial (longitudinal) evolution of the SC induced along an optical fiber. The method was experimentally tested on highly nonlinear fibers. The experimental results are in a good agreement with the optical spectra measured at the fiber outputs.

Characterization of supercontinuum generation along a silica tapered optical fiber using a confocal micro-spectrometer

“…The knowledge of the longitudinal evolution of the field along the waveguide represents a higher level of test for numerical models and for the determination of some numerical parameters. Although some techniques already exist to measure broad spectra with nanometric spatial resolution along sub-millimetric nonlinear waveguides with a SNOM, 4 or along optical fibers with a metric resolution with a modified OTDR, 5 no non-destructive and non-invasive technique exists for centimetric nonlinear waveguides. For that purpose, we recently developed a new experimental technique allowing longitudinal spectral measurements of light propagating in an optical waveguide with a micrometric spatial resolution and sub-nanometric spectral resolution.…”

Distributed measurement of supercontinuum generation along a silica fiber taper using a confocal spectrometer

“…Several distributed measurement techniques dedicated to SC analysis have already been proposed and demonstrated [5,6]. One method is based on using a modified optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) to map SC with meter spatial resolution [5].…”

“…Several distributed measurement techniques dedicated to SC analysis have already been proposed and demonstrated [5,6]. One method is based on using a modified optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) to map SC with meter spatial resolution [5]. Another method, potentially invasive, involves using a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) for short millimeter-long waveguides with nanometer-scale resolution [6].…”