Manipulating supercontinuum generation by minute continuous wave.

We report a simple triggering mechanism that greatly enhances and stabilizes supercontinuum generation by using an extremely weak cw light (~200,000 times weaker than the pump light). Such an active manipulation scheme can be enabled by a wide range of input conditions and circumvents complex techniques such as precise time delay tuning and dedicated feedback control. It thus offers a handy and versatile approach to control and optimize supercontinuum generation, expanding its range of applications, including ultrafast all-optical signal processing, spectroscopy, and imaging. The utility of the present technique for improving signal integrity in chirped pump optical parametric amplification is also demonstrated.

Tunable single-longitudinal-mode fiber optical parametric oscillator.

A tunable single-longitudinal-mode (SLM) fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO) is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. A sub-ring cavity with a short cavity length is used to suppress the longitudinal modes and broaden the longitudinal mode spacing. A fiber loop mirror, consisted of an unpumped erbium-doped fiber, acts as an autotracking filter for providing fine mode restriction and ensuring the single-frequency operation. The measurement based on a homodyne method shows that the FOPO provides the SLM output. Furthermore the SLM FOPO can be tunable over 14 nm for each of the signal and the idler, which is limited only by the gain bandwidth of the fiber optical parametric amplifier.

Fast and wide tuning wavelength-swept source based on dispersion-tuned fiber optical parametric oscillator.

We demonstrate a dispersion-tuned fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO)-based swept source with a sweep rate of 40 kHz and a wavelength tuning range of 109 nm around 1550 nm. The cumulative speed exceeds 4,000,000 nm/s. The FOPO is pumped by a sinusoidally modulated pump, which is driven by a clock sweeping linearly from 1 to 1.0006 GHz. A spool of dispersion-compensating fiber is added inside the cavity to perform dispersion tuning. The instantaneous linewidth is 0.8 nm without the use of any wavelength selective element inside the cavity. 1 GHz pulses with pulse width of 150 ps are generated.

Widely tunable picosecond optical parametric oscillator using highly nonlinear fiber.

We demonstrated a fully fiber-integrated widely tunable picosecond optical parametric oscillator based on highly nonlinear fiber. The ring cavity with a 50 m highly nonlinear fiber was synchronously pumped with a picosecond mode-locked fiber laser. The tuning range was from 1413 to 1543 nm and from 1573 to 1695 nm, which was as wide as 250 nm. A high-quality pulse was generated with a pulse width narrower than that of the pump.