Abstract

Supercontinuum (SC) optical pulse generation using solid nonlinear media is demonstrated for a femtosecond laser pulse with relatively narrow initial spectrum width of ~20 nm (50 fs, FWHM). We propose two methods for obtaining SC pulses with good beam quality. The first method is to increase the number of thin fused silica plates and optimize their position arrangement along the optical path using SPIDER measurements. The second method is to employ induced-phase modulation by the second-harmonic pulses in the thin plates. We obtain SC pulses ranging from 450 to 900 nm, which is comparable to pulses generated by a rare-gas filled hollow core fiber.

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