Watt-level, broadband mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in selected soft-glass fibers - recent works at MUT

摘要

High-power supercontinuum (SC) generation in soft glass fibers is a relatively new research domain and the number of research groups dealing with this topic is still very small. Nevertheless, the results already achieved are very impressive and promising regarding potential applications of SC sources. In this paper I briefly reviewed recent results on high-power SC generation in fluoride fibers achieved at the Institute of Optoelectronics (Military University of Technology, MUT). The works are mainly focused on achieving high spectral flatness as well as very good power distribution towards the long wavelengths, while keeping the output time-averaged power at the level of over 1 W. To this aim, different home-built pump sources (e.g. mode-locked fiber laser and amplifier, gain-switched fiber laser and amplifier) and some selected nonlinear fibers (fluorozirconate, fluoroindate) were used for tests. Such light sources can find applications in a lot of important areas, like stand-off detection, directional countermeasure, and medicine. For these applications, the magnitude of bandwidth, spectral flatness as well as the level of output power together with efficient power distribution towards the mid-IR are very important factors.