Supercontinuum generation from zinc borate glasses: bandgap versus rare-earth doping.

We report an enhanced supercontinuum generation (SCG) from a rare-earth (Pr3+) doped low bandgap zinc borate glass when excited with 60 fs pulses from a Ti-sapphire laser. The emission associated with the absorption bands due to Pr3+ doping (around 420-500 and 580-600 nm) is observed to assist the enhanced SCG.

Tellurite photonic crystal fiber.

We report the fabrication of a Tellurite photonic crystal fiber, and demonstrate its waveguiding properties. The measured minimum loss is 2.3 dB/m at a wavelength of 1055 nm. The fiber supports several modes, but in practice just the fundamental mode can be used. We have observed strong stimulated Raman scattering in a fiber with an effective area Aeff=21.2microm2, using sub-ns, ~ 1 microJ pump pulses at 1064.

Supercontinuum generation with 200 pJ laser pulses in an extruded SF6 fiber at 1560 nm.

We report an all-fiber diode-pumped Erbium-fiber oscillator-amplifier system as a source for supercontinuum generation in a photonic crystal fiber at 1560 nm. The passively mode-locked oscillator-amplifier system provides linearly polarized output pulses of 60 fs and an average output power of 59 mW at a repetition rate of 59.1 MHz. The laser pulses were launched into an extruded SF6-fiber for generation of an ultra-broadband supercontinuum. The evolution of the supercontinuum as a function of launched pulse energy was investigated. With pulse energies of about 200 pJ we observed a more than octave-spanning supercontinuum from 400 nm to beyond 1750 nm.