Supercontinuum generation at 155 m in a dispersion-flattened polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of symmetrical supercontinuum of over 40 nm in the 1.55 m region (1540 - 1580 nm) by injecting 1562 nm, 2.2 ps, 40 GHz optical pulses into a 200 m-long, dispersion-flattened polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber. The chromatic dispersion and dispersion slope of the fiber at 1.55 m are -0.23 ps/km/nm and 0.01 ps/km/nm2, respectively. This is the first report of 1.55 m band supercontinuum generation in a dispersion-flattened and polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber.

Design of supercontinuum generating photonic crystal fiber at 1.06, 1.31 and 1.55 µm wavelengths for medical imaging and optical transmission systems

“…These nonlinear coefficients values are higher than those ones reported in References [2][3][4]11,12,17]. The confinement losses are less than 10 −1 dB/km in the targeted wavelength range which is lower than Rayleigh scattering loss in conventional fiber [8].…”

“…The zero dispersion wavelengths can thus be shifted toward the visible to near IR and matched with the operating wavelength of a large variety of nanosecond to femtosecond high peak power lasers, yielding broadband continuum [2]. The broadband supercontinuum (SC) generation in optical fibers currently attracts a lot of attention because of the high potential for applications in the fields of the optical communications, optical coherence tomography (OCT), optical metrology, time resolved absorption and spectroscopy [3][4][5][6][7]. OCT enables micron-scale, cross--sectional and three-dimensional imaging of biological tissues in situ and in real time.…”

Cascaded higher-order soliton for non-adiabatic pulse compression

“…The dispersive properties of PCFs are very sensitive to the air-hole diameter and the hole-to-hole spacing [27], which indicates an attractive property of great controllability of chromatic dispersion in the PCF. Controllability of chromatic dispersion is a very important problem in optical communication systems [28], dispersion compensation [29], and nonlinear optics [30,31]. So far, various PCFs with remarkable dispersion properties have been studied both experimentally and numerically [32,33].…”

Numerical modeling of photonic crystal fibers

“…In short wavelength range, this PCF supports the second order mode; however, the confinement loss of the second-order mode is larger than 1000 dB/m in the wavelength range over 1.0 µm and the effective refractive indices of the second-order mode are quite different from those of the fundamental mode, so this PCF effectively operates as an SMF in the telecommunication window. The PCF with nearly zero flattened-dispersion and small effective area is attracting interest because it can offer high nonlinearity over a wide wavelength range [77], [78].…”