Recent advances on IR supercontinuum source and its applications

High efficiency IR supercontinuum generation and applications: a review

“…Although some results, shown in this section, have been published by our team previously [4,[7][8][9][10][11], a review on these previous works will help to have an overall picture of our work in this field. The pumping source is a femtosecond laser source connected with an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) that can output any wavelength within 1.1 μm -11 μm spectral range.…”

“…Thus, it is possible to generate high average power IR SC source (up to 3.1 micron) by employing single crystal sapphire fiber. In the last a couple of years, we have demonstrated supercontinuum generation in Sapphire fiber [4,[7][8][9][10], to be reviewed in detail in Section 2. To further extend the IR wavelength range, in the section 3 of this paper, we will present a new type of IR fiber, which not only has a broader spectral range (up to seven microns) but also has a high laser damaging threshold.…”

“…This nonlinear interaction is involved with several nonlinear processes, which include (1) self phase modulation (SPM), (2) four-wave mixing (FWM), (3) high order harmonic generation, (4) four wave mixing, (5) stimulated Raman scattering, and (6) soliton related dynamics. Under the slowly varying envelope approximation (SVEA) [2], the SC generation process can be described by the following nonlinear Schrödinger equation, as given by [3,4] ( )…”

“…1. (a) Sketch of the experimental set up for the IR supercontinuum generation in sapphire fiber, (b) the picture of the experimental system[4].…”

Mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in a single-mode thulium-doped fiber amplifier

“…Supercontinuum (SC) generation-a physical phenomenon where a narrowband light propagating in a nonlinear medium, as a result of the interplay of many nonlinear processes, is transformed to a signal with a very broad spectrum-has attracted great attention from the research community, mainly due to its numerous potential applications in telecommunications, spectroscopy, metrology and medical imaging (e.g. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]). The first experiments on SC generation were performed by focusing high peak-power pulses into solid [8,9] or gas [10] nonlinear media.…”