Overcoming temporal polarization instabilities from the latent birefringence in all-normal dispersion, wave-breaking-extended nonlinear fiber supercontinuum generation

Domingue, Scott R.; Bartels, Randy A.

doi:10.1364/oe.21.013305

Cited by 24 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…through polarization modulation instability [30,31], which severely limits the applicability of ANDi SC sources in the ultrafast photonics applications mentioned above. However, this polarization-related noise can be effectively suppressed by increasing the birefringence of the fiber, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limits of coherent supercontinuum generation in normal dispersion fibers

et al. 2017

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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 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-phasematched 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, amongst others.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limits of coherent supercontinuum generation in normal dispersion fibers

et al. 2017

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“…However, above a certain threshold of output power, this SC suffers a hardly controllable nonlinear depolarization effect [12–14], so that the spectrum of the SC defies the scalar generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation (GNLSE) [13] and the polarization of the SC endures long-term instability [14]. In these prior works, the depolarization effect has been attributed to vector modulation instability [3,15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we directly observe the short-term noise by polarized RIN measurements and the spectral decoherence through pulse compressibility assessment. Thus, the nonlinear depolarization and vector modulation instability not only negatively affect the controllability and long-term stability of the ANDi fiber SC generation [13,14], but also fundamentally limit the application of this technology when full spectral coherence or low-noise polarized source is required. By fabricating a dispersion-flattened ANDi photonic crystal fiber with a large intentional birefringence (>10 4 ), we suppress these effects and therefore develop a high-power broadband coherent SC laser.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suppressing Short-Term Polarization Noise and Related Spectral Decoherence in All-Normal Dispersion Fiber Supercontinuum Generation

Liu

Zhao

Lyngsø

et al. 2015

J. Lightwave Technol.

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The supercontinuum generated exclusively in the normal dispersion regime of a nonlinear fiber is widely believed to possess low optical noise and high spectral coherence. The recent development of flattened all-normal dispersion fibers has been motivated by this belief to construct a general-purpose broadband coherent optical source. Somewhat surprisingly, we identify a large short-term polarization noise in this type of supercontinuum generation that has been masked by the total-intensity measurement in the past, but can be easily detected by filtering the supercontinuum with a linear polarizer. Fortunately, this hidden intrinsic noise and the accompanied spectral decoherence can be effectively suppressed by using a polarization-maintaining all-normal dispersion fiber. A polarization-maintaining coherent supercontinuum laser is thus built with a broad bandwidth (780–1300 nm) and high spectral power (~1 mW/nm).

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“…Recent work has revealed that normal dispersion spectral broadening can lead to stable supercontinuum (SC) generation, provided that polarization modulation instability [9] is mitigated through propagation in polarization maintaining (PM) fibers [10]. While the broadening in the amplifier is not as extensive as SC generation in nonlinear optical fiber, the nonlinear phase shifts are still quite large at ϕ nl ∼ 5 − 12π [11].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The output chirp of an ANDi laser operating with modest average power (∼500 mW, 22 nm bandwidth, and 130 fs FWHM transform limited pulse duration) contains a significant amount of TOD. In combination with small fluctuations in the power spectral density from the ANDi oscillator (<2%), the temporal structure from the uncorrected TOD on the pulse can drive large spectral fluctuations in all normal dispersion SC generation [10]. Eliminating the influence of spectral fluctuations from the ANDi oscillator during nonlinear broadening in the amplifier is critical; requiring seed pulses with minimal residual cubic chirp after compression.…”

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confidence: 99%