We have characterized the supercontinuum generation along a tapered silica optical fiber using a highly-sensitive distributed measurement technique. Based on a confocal Raman micro-spectrometer, this method involves far-field point-by-point Rayleigh scattering analysis along the waveguide, providing micrometer spatial resolution and high spectral resolution. This non-destructive and non-invasive technique enables the observation of each step of supercontinuum generation along the fiber taper.
We present a comprehensive investigation of Raman scattering (RS) and supercontinuum (SC) generation in high-index doped silica glass integrated optical waveguides under diverse femtosecond pumping wavelengths and input polarization states. We first report the observation based on a confocal Raman microscope of new Raman peaks different from fused silica at 48 THz and 75 THz, respectively. We then demonstrate broadband supercontinuum generation from 700 nm to 2500 nm when pumping into the anomalous dispersion regime at 1200 nm, 1300 nm, and 1550 nm, respectively. Conversely, narrower SC spectra were generated when pumping in the normal dispersion regime at 1000 nm of self-phase modulation and optical wave breakup. A good agreement is found with numerical simulations of a nonlinear Schrödinger equation including the new Raman response. We also study the impact of the TE/TM polarization modes of the integrated waveguide on SC generation.
We report SCG over 1.4 octave(from 620nm to 1.5µm) by pumping at 1060nm on a dispersion-engineered ultra low-loss SiN integrated waveguide with femtosecond pulse of 300W as peak power. We demonstrate SCG over 2.5 octaves(from 580nm to 2.05µm) when a wider and longer waveguide being pumped at 1550nm with peak power of 800W. We also experimentally observe a 4.5 octaves(from 500nm to 2.75µm) SCG by pumping at 1550nm on the 800nm thick SiN platform. We show the versatility of CEA LETI 800nm thick ultra-low loss SiN platform to SCG,
Fiber-based supercontinuum (SC) generation has been a subject of intense interest over the last decade, with a significant impact on both basic science and industry. New uses for SC fiber sources are constantly emerging due to their unique properties that combine high brightness, visible to mid-infrared (MIR) wavelength coverage, fiber delivery, and single-mode output. Recent years have seen significant progress in overcoming the current shortcomings of SC sources in terms of wavelength coverage towards the 2 to 20 mu molecular fingerprint mid-infrared (MIR) region and in the ultraviolet (UV) down to 100 nm, while also improving stability, noise, coherence, power density, and robustness. In this talk, we will review all the recent advances in supercontinuum generation in a range of specialty optical fibers including: fluoride, chalcogenide, telluride, and silicon-core fibers for the MIR; UV-grade silica fibers and gas-filled hollow-core fibers for the UV range; and all-normal dispersion fibers for ultra-low noise coherent SC generation. Significant developments have been made in reaching target UV and MIR wavelength ranges, and the fiber SC has matured considerably to become a truly disruptive technology able to meet a range of societal and industrial challenges.
Microstructured optical fibres (MOFs), also known as Photonic Crystal Fibres (PCFs) or Holey Fibres (HFs), play an important role in supercontinuum generation because of their high nonlinearity and ability to tailor the dispersion profile. Nowadays, studies have extended to the multimode environment to enhance spectral broadening by taking advantage of various intermodal nonlinear effects. Recently, it has been shown that these types of fibres can also be able to provide spatially cleaned output beams through a novel nonlinear spatial effect called Kerr-induced beam self-cleaning (KBSC), which makes these fibres suitable for a variety of multimode-based applications. In this paper, a full modal analysis of germanium (Ge)-doped graded-index multimode PCFs with different geometrical sizes is provided. The influence of fibre size on modal properties, such as effective refractive index, birefringence and dispersion, was investigated using the finite element method. It was found that the changes in the geometric parameters can significantly affect the modal properties and then the frequency generation and spectral broadening. Experimentally, high-efficiency frequency generation with different frequency detunings was obtained in a short length of each PCF by launching input pulses at 1064 nm pump wavelength. For longer fibre length and high input power, supercontinuum generation with improved broadening from visible to near IR by intermodal four-wave mixing and stimulated Raman scattering was observed in all PCFs. A study of the effect of input peak power, input polarization axis and fibre length on supercontinuum spectrum is presented. Experimental evidence of the KBSC effect as a function of various fibre and laser parameters is also reported. The evolution of spatial output beam pattern from higher-order mode to fundamental mode with low-peak-power self-cleaning threshold was observed for all the fibres by launching a 1064 nm pump laser with 1 ns pulse duration.
We report numerical and experimental studies of instabilities in a “noise-like pulse” dissipative soliton laser generating an output spectrum of 1000 nm bandwidth, and with two orders of magnitude variation in intracavity spectral width over one roundtrip. Simulations identify the origin of the laser instability as the sensitivity to noise of nonlinear soliton dynamics. Our experiments use real-time time and frequency domain measurements, and our simulations reproduce quantitatively both the full extent of intracavity supercontinuum broadening, as well as the probability distributions of temporal and spectral fluctuations, including rogue waves.
Optical nanofibers have recently emerged as attractive nanophotonic platforms for several applications ranging from quantum technologies to nonlinear optics due to both the tight optical confinement and their wide evanescent field. In this work, we report on a theoretical and experimental investigation of the optical Kerr effect in the evanescent field of silica nanofibers immersed in several highly nonlinear liquids such as ethanol, acetone and water and we further compare them with air cladding. We provide formula of the effective nonlinear coefficients including the contribution of the nanofiber silica core and of the evanescent field for varying nanofiber diameter and for different surrounding media. Our results show that the contribution of the silica core inversely scales with the effective mode area, while the cladding contribution via the evanescent field depends both on the taper diameter and the nonlinear properties of the liquid. More specifically, it is shown in a silica nanofiber immersed in acetone that the evanescent field contribution to the total Kerr effect is greater than that of the silica core for a taper diameter smaller than 560 nm. We further report the observation of a strong evanescent Kerr effect through measurements of the stimulated Raman-Kerr scattering in a silica nanofiber immersed in acetone. The evanescent Kerr effect is shown to give rise to a strong asymmetric spectral broadening of the first Raman order generated in the nonlinear liquid. Finally, the evanescent Kerr and Raman effects demonstrated in this work may find potential applications to ultra-sensitive liquid sensing and Raman spectroscopy, as the optical mode propagating in the nanofiber essentially interacts with the outer environment without any major contribution from the nanofiber itself.
Ultrafast mode-locked lasers are well-known to display a rich variety of unstable dissipative soliton dynamics resulting from the interplay of nonlinearity, dispersion and dissipation. Although laser instabilities have been known and studied in depth for many years, their properties have recently received greatly renewed attention because of the development of time and frequency domain techniques that allow laser dynamics and instabilities to be measured in real-time. This has allowed the variations in circulating pulse characteristics to be examined on a roundtrip to roundtrip basis, providing a new window into understanding these instabilities and how they develop based on the cavity configuration being used.
A technique of this kind that has proven both straightforward to implement and powerful is the photonic time stretch or dispersive Fourier transform (DFT) which has been used in a number of important applications including the measurement of soliton rogue waves, modulation instability and supercontinuum noise. The DFT allows direct access to shot-to-shot measurement of the mode-locked fibre laser spectrum and, via computation of the associated autocorrelation function, can also provide complementary time-domain information in cases where multiple pulse states are observed.
In this paper, we report results of DFT measurements which have been used to reveal previously unreported behavior in a mode-locked fiber laser designed to operate with soliton-similariton dynamics. In particular, we observe instabilities including soliton explosions, chaotic evolution and oscillation in the relative phase of bound-state multi-pulse molecules, and what we believe to be a previously-unobserved regime of operation associated with the intermittent appearance of short-lived stable single pulses within of otherwise chaotic dynamics. Our results - obtained in a laser believed to be a particularly stable design - suggest that instabilities such as soliton explosions and intermittence are a universal feature of dissipative soliton systems transitioning from noise to stability.
The mid-infrared spectral region is a great technical and scientific interest in numerous research field and applications. Among these studies, the generation of mid-infrared supercontinuum in fibers has attracted strong interest in the last decade, because of unique properties such as broad wavelength-coverage and brightness. In this work, a cascaded supercontinuum generated in a fluoride and a chalcogenide fiber spanning from 2 to 10 µm has been used for the detection of infrared signatures of organic compounds. Those results open a new way for remote sensing and spectroscopy in the mid-IR.
We investigate both theoretically and experimentally the polarization properties of Brillouin light scattering in silica optical nanofibers. Our results show that while all hybrid acoustic waves scatter light without altering the state of polarization, one of the surface acoustic wave generates a depolarized Stokes light. Because of the slight ellipticity of the nanofiber, the surface wave is actually split into two torso-radial modes which give rise to polarization scrambling of the backward Brillouin Stokes signal. Our model also predicts that the polarization of the scattered light can be restored for one specific pump polarization.
Supercontinuum (SC) generation towards the mid-infrared (MIR) range is an active field of research and development motivated by a wide range of applications including optical coherence tomography (OCT), material processing, optical sensing and absorption spectroscopy. In this work, we investigate mid-IR SC generation in a cascaded silica and soft-glass fiber system directly pumped with a commercially-available picosecond fiber laser operating in the telecommunications window at 1.55 μm. This all-fiber system is shown to generate a flat broadband mid-IR-SC covering the entire range from 2 to 10 μm with several tens of mW of output power. This technique paves the way for practical and robust broadband SC sources in the mid-IR without the requirement of mid-infrared pump sources or Thulium-doped fiber amplifiers. We also describe a fully-realistic numerical model used to simulate the nonlinear pulse propagation through the cascaded fiber system and use our numerical results to discuss the physical processes underlying the spectral broadening in the cascaded system.
We demonstrate broadband supercontinuum generation from 560 nm up to 2350 nm by coupling a Q-switched picosecond microchip laser at 1064 nm into a 15 μm-core step-index germanium-doped silica fiber, designed to support five spatial modes at 1064 nm. It is further shown that multiple cascaded intermodal four-wave mixing and Raman processes take place in the fiber with large frequency detuning up to 150 THz. The multimode properties of this fiber yield a number of intermodal nonlinear coupling terms and the parametric sideband wavelengths have been obtained from the phasematching condition for intermodal four-wave mixing.
ABSTRACT In this paper we investigate supercontinuum (SC) generation in several suspended-core soft-glass photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) pumped by an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) tunable around 1550 nm. The fibers were drawn from leadbismuth- gallium-cadmium-oxide glass (PBG81) featuring a wide transmission window from 0.5 μm till 2.7 μm and a high nonlinear refractive index up to 43×10-20 m2/W. They have been specifically designed with a microscale suspended hexagonal core for efficient pumping around 1550 nm. This microstructure geometry also prevents from glass recrystallization and provides higher mechanical durability. We experimentally demonstrate two SC spectra spanning from 1.07 μm to 2.31 μm and 0.89 μm to 2.46 μm by pumping two PCFs in both normal and anomalous dispersion regimes at 1550 nm and 1580 nm, respectively. We further show a number of nonlinear phenomena such as spectral broadening due to self-phase modulation, soliton generation, and Raman soliton self-frequency shift in the fiber at the pumping wavelengths. We also numerically simulate the group velocity dispersion curves for these fibers from their scanning electron microscope (SEM) images.
We demonstrate a simple and efficient technique that allows for a complete characterization of silica-based tapered optical fibers with sub-wavelength diameters ranging from 0.5 μm to 1.2 μm. The technique is based on Brillouin reflectometry using a single-ended heterodyne detection. It has a high precision sensitivity down to 1% owing to the strong dependence of the Brillouin spectrum on the taper diameter. We further investigate the tensile strain dependence of the Brillouin spectrum for an optical microfiber up to 5% of elongation. The results show strong dependences of several Brillouin resonances with different strain coefficients ranging from 290 MHz/% to 410 MHz/% with a specific nonlinear deviation at high strain. Those results therefore show that optical micro and nanofibers could find potential application for sensitive strain optical sensing.
Modulation instability is a fundamental process of nonlinear physics, leading to the unstable breakup of a constant amplitude solution of a particular physical system. There has been particular interest in studying modulation instability in the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) which models a wide range of nonlinear systems including superfluids, fiber optics, plasmas and Bose-Einstein condensates. Modulation instability in the NLSE is also a significant current area of study in the context of understanding the emergence of high amplitude or high intensity events that satisfy "rogue wave" statistical criteria. Here, exploiting recent advances in real time ultrafast optical metrology via an optical time lens system, we perform real-time measurements in an NLSE optical fibre system of the unstable breakup of a continuous wave field, simultaneously characterising emergent modulation instability breathers, and their associated statistics. Our results allow quantitative comparison between experiment, modelling, and theory, and we show very good agreement in both extracted intensity profiles and associated statistics.
Fabrication and characterization of submicron optical waveguides is one of the major challenges in modern photonics, as they find many applications from optical sensors to plasmonic devices. Here we report on a novel technique that allows for a complete and precise characterization of silica optical nanofibers. Our method relies on the Brillouin backscattering spectrum analysis that directly depends on the waveguide geometry. Our method was applied to several fiber tapers with diameter ranging from 500 nm to 3 μm. Results were compared to scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images and numerical simulations with very good agreement and similar sensitivity.
Light propagation in small-core photonic crystal fibers enables tight optical confinement over long propagation lengths to enhance light-matter interactions. Not only can photonic crystal fibers compress light spatially, they also provide a tunable means to control light-hypersound interactions. By exploring Brillouin light scattering in a small-core and high air-filling fraction microstructured fiber, we report the observation of Brillouin scattering from surface acoustic waves at lower frequencies than standard Brillouin scattering from bulk acoustic waves. This effect could find potential applications for optical sensing technologies that exploit surface acoustic waves.
We investigate Brillouin scattering in hybrid As2Se3 PMMA tapered fiber and demonstrate that Brillouin
frequency shift can be widely tuned over a broad radio-frequency range by varying the core diameter of the
optical tapered fiber.
We use a continuous-wave low power incoherent seed to control spontaneous modulation instability (MI) in a highly-nonlinear
optical fiber. We show both experimentally and numerically that spectral and noise properties of MI can be
accurately controlled provided the spectral characteristics of the seed are chosen carefully. Specifically, we evidence the
strong influence of the seed coherence on the output pulses signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth. Stochastic nonlinear
Schrödinger equation simulations are in excellent agreement with experiments.
We demonstrate experimentally and numerically the generation of a new class of surface acoustic waves in a
subwavelength-diameter silica microwire and term this new effect as surface acoustic wave Brillouin scattering
(SAWBS).
We use hybrid polymer-chalcogenide optical microwires to realize mid-infrared frequency conversion via the process of
normal dispersion modulation instability (MI). Phase-matching is achieved through a negative fourth-order dispersion
coefficient and leads to the apparition of parametric sidebands located at 2 μm and 3.5 μm, corresponding to a frequency
shift of 30 Thz relative to the pump, which is among the largest reported using normal-dispersion pumped MI in a singlepass
configuration in the mid-IR Stochastic nonlinear Schrödinger equation simulations are in excellent agreement with
experiments.
We have developed a fibre-based source of "black light", a source that emits broadband ultraviolet radiation but
only small amounts of visible light and no infrared light. We made this source by pumping a specially designed
silica photonic crystal fibre with 355 nm light pulses from a Q-switched frequency-tripled Nd:YAG laser. Four-wave
mixing and cascaded Raman generation combine in the fibre to provide a broadband continuum output
that spans from around 350 nm to 390-470 nm, with the exact spectral width dependent on the pump power.
We discuss the main limitations in terms of bandwidth and power due to temporal walk-off, fiber attenuation
and solarization and we suggest simple solutions for further progress. This broadband black-light source could
be useful for performing gas absorption spectroscopy or exciting various fluorescent proteins used in biological
studies.
In this work we demonstrate two new BOTDA sensing systems based on differential (DPSK) and quadrature
(QPSK) phase-shift keying modulation techniques with enhanced performances. First we demonstrate Brillouin
echoes distributed sensing (BEDS) with centimeter resolution using a single intensity DPSK modulator for the
pump pulse. The optical π-phase pulse is directly generated at the end of an intensity pulse using DPSK
technique. This allows an easy adjustment of the delay between the intensity and phase pulse and improves the
optical loss of the pump. The second technique uses an optical QPSK modulator (I & Q modulator) as a single
sideband (SSB) modulator. The advantage of I & Q modulator compared to dual-drive modulator lies on the
high performance of carrier suppression of 55 dB as well as side-mode suppression of 40 dB at 1535 nm. Besides
the filter that chooses either the Stokes or anti-Stokes component before detecting the Brillouin response on the
photodiode is no more needed. By use of the I & Q modulator the performance of BOTDA using either Stokes
or anti-Stokes component is shown and discussed.
Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCF) play a crucial role for fundamental investigations such as acousto-optical interactions
as well as for applications, such as distributed sensors. One limiting factor for these experiments is the
fiber inhomogeneity owing to the drawing process. In this paper we study the effect of structural irregularities on
both the backward and forward Brillouin scattering by comparing two PCFs drawn with different parameters, in
order to minimize diameter fluctuations. We fully characterize their Brillouin properties including the backward
Brillouin spectrum, the Brillouin threshold, a distributed measurement along the fibers and polarized Guided
Acoustic Wave Brillouin Scattering (GAWBS). In the Brillouin spectrum we observe a single peak as in a singlemode
fiber whereas former investigations have often shown a multiple peak spectrum in PCFs with small core.
The theoretical and experimental values for the Brillouin threshold are in good agreement, which results from
the single peak spectrum. By using a Brillouin echoes distributed sensing system (BEDS), we also investigate
the Brillouin spectrum along the fiber with a high spatial resolution of 30 cm. Our results reveal a clear-cut
difference between the distributed measurements in the two fibers and confirm the previous experiments. In the
same way the GAWBS allows us to estimate the uniformity of the fibers. The spectra show a main peak at about
750 MHz, in accordance with theoretical simulations of the acoustic mode and of the elasto-optical coefficient.
The fiber inhomogeneity impacts on the stability and the quality factor of the measured GAWBS spectra. We
finally show that the peak frequency of the trapped acoustic mode is more related to the optical effective area
rather than the core diameter of the PCF. Thus measuring the main GAWBS peak can be applied for the precise
measurement of the effective area of PCFs.
We study guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS) in several photonic crystal fibers (PCF) with different
kind of air-hole microstructure and we show this effect is enhanced only for a few acoustic phonons. The results of our
numerical simulations based on a finite element method reveal that these acosuti waves emitted in the GHz range are
indeed trapped within the air-hole microstructure, in good agreement with experimental observations. The periodic
wavelength-scale air-hole microstructure of solid-core PCFs can indeed drastically alter the transverse elastic waves
distribution and therefore forward Brillouin scattering compared to what is commonly observed in conventional all-silica
fibers. We show additionnally that the elasto-optic diffraction coefficient and the transverse acousto-optic field overlap
are maximum for these acoustic waves. For the most intense GAWBS modes, we investigate the scattering efficiency
and temperature dependence of the fundamental phonon frequency for sensing applications.
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