Abstract

Continuous-wave (CW) super-continua have found applications in various domains such as sensing, spectroscopy, test and measurement and generation of broadly tunable lasers. CW supercontinua are implemented by high power pumping of a fiber in the anomalous dispersion regime, close to its zero-dispersion [1-3]. Pumped by Ytterbium doped fiber lasers, photonic crystal fibers are necessary since conventional silica fibers have zero dispersion only beyond 1310nm [1]. However, this approach has limitations arising from the complexities of using photonic crystal fibers. It is desirable to have an all fiber supercontinuum using standard silica fibers. However, sources at the 1.5micron band, where highly nonlinear fibers with zero dispersion are easily available are limited in power. Further, the power density achieved in such sources is poor in the normal dispersion region (between 1-1.5micron) [2-3]. Here, we demonstrate a novel technique for high power, high efficiency, supercontinua generation using the recently proposed cascaded Raman fiber amplifier architecture [4] for Raman lasers.

© 2017 IEEE