High-power broadband supercontinuum generation through a simple narrow-bandwidth FBGs-based fiber laser cavity

Abstract

The generation of supercontinuum (SC) often requires ultrashort pulsed lasers with high peak power and gain media with large nonlinear coefficients, such as a long piece of fiber or photonic crystal fiber. In this Letter, we propose and demonstrate that high-power SC can be generated through a simple narrow-bandwidth fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs)-based laser cavity without any modulation, based on the mechanism of intense nonlinear effects induced by the inherent self-pulsation generated inside the cavity. In the experiment, an ∼80 W SC laser with the spectrum range from < 600 nm to 1600 nm was achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report about SC generation through a simple fiber laser cavity. This work enriches the research content of SC and provides a cost-effective method for high-power SC lasers.

Spectral manipulation in a high-power ultrafast fiber laser system generating ultrashort pulses with GHz repetition rate

“…There exist mainly two approaches to generate ultrafast fiber laser at 1.1 μm: supercontinuum generation using highly nonlinear fibers [19][20][21][22][23] , or wavelength shifting inside or outside the laser cavities through nonlinear effects such as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) [24][25][26][27] . The former approach manifests low power spectral density, and only a limited portion of the supercontinuum wavelength range is useful.…”