Supercontinuum spanning over an octave from 900 - 2300 nm is reported in an all-normal dispersion, soft glass photonic crystal fiber. The all-solid microstructured fiber was engineered to achieve a normal dispersion profile flattened to within -50 to -30 ps/nm/km in the wavelength range of 1100 - 2700 nm. Under pumping with 75 fs pulses centered at 1550 nm, the recorded spectral flatness is 7 dB in the 930 - 2170 nm range, and significantly less if cladding modes present in the uncoated photonic crystal fiber are removed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an octave-spanning, all-normal dispersion supercontinuum generation in a non-silica microstructured fiber, where the spectrum long-wavelength edge is red-shifted to as far as 2300 nm. This is also an important step in moving the concept of ultrafast coherent supercontinuum generation in all-normal dispersion fibers further towards the mid-infrared spectral region.

In this paper we report on successful supercontinuum generation extending from the near to the mid-infrared region in the range 700-2500 nm in a micro-structured fiber made of lead-bismuth-galate glass and pumped in the femtosecond regime with a wavelength of 1540 nm. The flatness of 5 dB is observed in most of the registered spectrum 1000 -2500 nm. The improved spectral and thermo-physical properties of this custom made lead-bismuth-galate glass against tellurite and commercially available heavy oxide SF-57 glasses are presented.

Abstract.A broad review is given of microstructured fiber optics components -light guides, image guides, multicapillary arrays, and photonic crystal fibers -fabricated using the stack-and-draw method from various in-house synthesized oxide soft glasses at the Glass Department of the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (ITME). The discussion covers fundamental aspects of stack-and-draw technology used at ITME, through design methods, soft glass material issues and parameters, to demonstration of representative examples of fabricated structures and an experimental characterization of their optical properties and results obtained in typical applications. Specifically, demonstrators include microstructured image guides providing resolution of up to 16000 pixels sized up to 20 µm in diameter, and various photonic crystal fibers (PCFs): index-guiding regular lattice air-hole PCFs, hollow core photonic bandgap PCFs, or specialty PCFs like highly birefringent microstructured fibers or highly nonlinear fibers for supercontinuum generation. The presented content is put into context of previous work in the area reported by the group of authors, as well as other research teams.

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We report on octave-spanning supercontinuum generation under pumping with 1360 nm, 120 fs pulses, in an all-solid, all-normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber. The fiber was drawn from thermally matched oxide soft glasses with a hexagonal lattice 35 µm in diameter, 2.5 µm solid core and pitch of Λ/d = 0.9. The fiber was designed for normal dispersion broadly flattened in the 1200–2800 nm range. Experimentally recorded supercontinuum spectrum covered a 900–1900 nm bandwidth and was reconstructed with good agreement using numerical modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an experimentally demonstrated octave-spanning supercontinuum bandwidth, reaching as far as 1900 nm in the all-normal dispersion regime.