Extreme polarization-dependent supercontinuum generation in an uncladded silicon nitride waveguide.

We experimentally demonstrate the generation of a short-wave infrared supercontinuum in an uncladded silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguide with extreme polarization sensitivity at the pumping wavelength of 2.1 µm. The air-clad waveguide is specifically designed to yield anomalous dispersion regime for transverse electric (TE) mode excitation and all-normal-dispersion (ANDi) at near-infrared wavelengths for the transverse magnetic (TM) mode. Dispersion engineering of the polarization modes allows for switching via simple adjustment of the input polarization state from an octave-spanning soliton fission-driven supercontinuum with fine spectral structure to a flat and smooth ANDi supercontinuum dominated by a self-phase modulation mechanism (SPM). Such a polarization sensitive supercontinuum source offers versatile applications such as broadband on-chip sensing to pulse compression and few-cycle pulse generation. Our experimental results are in very good agreement with numerical simulations.

Ghost optical coherence tomography.

We demonstrate experimentally ghost optical coherence tomography using a broadband incoherent supercontinuum light source with shot-to-shot random spectral fluctuations. The technique is based on ghost imaging in the spectral domain where the object is the spectral interference pattern generated from an optical coherence tomography interferometer in which a physical sample is placed. The axial profile of the sample is obtained from the Fourier transform of the correlation between the spectrally resolved intensity fluctuations of the supercontinuum and the integrated signal measured at the output of the interferometer. The results are in excellent agreement with measurements obtained from a conventional optical coherence tomography system.

Experimental demonstration of spectral domain computational ghost imaging.

We demonstrate computational spectral-domain ghost imaging by encoding complementary Fourier patterns directly onto the spectrum of a superluminescent laser diode using a programmable spectral filter. Spectral encoding before the object enables uniform spectral illumination across the beam profile, removing the need for light collection optics and yielding increased signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, the use of complementary Fourier patterns allows reduction of deleterious of parasitic light effects. As a proof-of-concept, we measure the wavelength-dependent transmission of a Michelson interferometer and a wavelength-division multiplexer. Our results open new perspectives for remote broadband spectral measurements.