Generation of a spectrum with high flatness and high bandwidth in a short length of telecom fiber using microchip laser

In this work, we studied experimentally the generation of a supercontinuum spectrum induced in a piece of standard single-mode fiber using pulses from a microchip laser. For different values of fiber length, we obtained spectra with high flatness in visible and IR regions. The possibility to generate a spectrum with a high flatness and spectral width of more than ∼1100 nm (600 nm to over 1700 nm) in relatively short lengths of telecom fiber (∼57 m), using as the pump pulses with no more than a few kW peak power at a non-zero-dispersion wavelength, is attributed to the peculiar properties of the pulses generated by the pump source. The physical processes leading to the formation of the supercontinuum spectrum were studied by monitoring the growth of the spectrum while increasing the input power. The coupling efficiency between the microchip laser and the telecom fiber helped us obtain a very wide spectrum. This work shows that the use of conventional fiber for supercontinuum generation can be viewed as a cheap and efficient option, in particular for applications like optical metrology, coherence tomography and low noise sources for the characterization of devices.