We report the optical system design of a novel speckle-free ultrafast Red-Green-Blue (RGB) source based on angularly multiplexed simultaneous second harmonic generation from the efficiently generated Stokes and anti-Stokes pulses from a commercially available photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with two zero dispersion wavelengths (TZDW). We describe the optimized configuration of the TZDW fiber source which supports excitations of dual narrow-band pulses with peak wavelengths at 850 nm, 1260 nm and spectral bandwidths of 23 nm, 26 nm, respectively within 12 cm of commercially available TZDW PCF. The conversion efficiencies are as high as 44% and 33% from the pump source (a custom-built Yb:fiber master-oscillator-power-amplifier). As a result of the nonlinear dynamics of propagation, the dual pulses preserve their ultrashort pulse width (with measured autocorrelation traces of 200 fs and 227 fs,) which eliminates the need for dispersion compensation before harmonic generation. With proper optical design of the free-space harmonic generation system, we achieve milli-Watt power level red, green and blue pulses at 630 nm, 517 nm and 425 nm. Having much broader spectral bandwidths compared to picosecond RGB laser sources, the source is inherently speckle-free due to the ultra-short coherence length (<37 μm) while still maintaining an excellent color rendering capability with >99.4% excitation purities of the three primaries, leading to the coverage of 192% NTSC color gamut (CIE 1976). The reported RGB source features a very simple system geometry, its potential for power scaling is discussed with currently available technologies.
Photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with two closely spaced zero dispersion wavelengths (TZDW) offers a unique route to efficient energy transfer to two spectrally localized continua beyond either side of the ZDWs, which we have employed in previous work for mid-IR difference frequency generation and speckle-free red-green-blue generation. In this manuscript, we report the interferometric coherence characterization and radio frequency (RF) noise measurements of the Stokes side TZDW component. With a custom-built 1.3 W, 1035 nm, 40 MHz, 240 fs Yb:fiber chirped pulse amplifier as the pump source, we use 12 cm of commercially available TZDW PCF to excite the dual narrow-band continua from which the Stokes pulse is filtered out with a 1180 nm long wave pass filter. We achieve 0.8 to 3 nJ of narrow-band pulses within the spectral range of 1200 – 1315 nm at an average power conversion efficiency of 33%. Employing an un-balanced Michelson interferometer, measured mutual spectral coherence of the Stokes pulse is in excess of 0.76 with pump Soliton order as high as N ~70. Its measured RF noise spectrum at the first harmonic of the laser repetition rate shows less than 8 dBc/Hz increase in relative intensity noise (RIN) compared to that of the power amplifier, which is consistent with reported studies employing sub-100 fs pulses from relatively low noise oscillators. In contrast to the broadband continuum from a single ZDW PCF wherein severe de-coherence is found with pumping at high soliton order and longer pump pulse width, the reported TZDW fiber source shows preservation of intensity stability and phase coherence against variation in pump pulse parameters, which not only attests to the stability of our reported method for mid-IR generation, but also shows promising potential towards an all-fiber, efficient and low noise ultrafast source that can be helpful for applications such as biomedical deep-tissue imaging.
We report a fiber based approach to broadly tunable femtosecond mid-IR source based on difference frequency mixing of the outputs from dual photonic crystal fibers (PCF) pumped by a femtosecond fiber laser, which is a custom-built Yb-doped fiber chirped pulse amplifier (CPA) delivering 1.35 W, 300 fs, 40 MHz pulses centered at 1035 nm. The CPA output is split into two arms to pump two different types of PCFs for generation of the spectrally separated pulses. The shorter wavelength pulses are generated in one PCF with its single zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) at 1040 nm. Low normal dispersion around the pumping wavelength enables spectral broadening dominated by self-phase modulation (SPM), which extends from 970 to 1092 nm with up to 340 mW of average power. The longer wavelength pulses are generated in a second PCF which has two closely spaced ZDWs around the laser wavelength. Facilitated by its special dispersion profile, the laser wavelength is converted to the normal dispersion region of the fiber, leading to the generation of the narrow-band intense Stokes pulses with 1 to 1.25 nJ of pulse energy at a conversion efficiency of ~30% from the laser pulses. By difference mixing the outputs from both PCFs in a type-II AgGaS2 crystal, mid-IR pulses tunable from 4.2 to 9 μm are readily generated with its average power ranging from 135 – 640 μW, corresponding to 3 – 16 pJ of pulse energy which is comparable to the reported fiber based mid-IR sources enabled by the solitons self-frequency shift (for example, 3 – 10 μm with 10 pJ of maximum pulse energy in [10]). The reported approach provides a power-scalable route to the generation of broadly tunable femtosecond mid-IR pulses, which we believe to be a promising solution for developing compact, economic and high performance mid-IR sources.
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