Broadband supercontinuum generation in specialty fibers
Broadband supercontinuum (SC) generation is of great scientific and technical interest, and emerged as one of the best broadband light sources in a range of applications including optical communication, precision spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), optical frequency metrology, hyper...
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Format: | Theses and Dissertations |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2019
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Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/89263 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/48038 |
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Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
Language: | English |
Summary: | Broadband supercontinuum (SC) generation is of great scientific and technical interest, and
emerged as one of the best broadband light sources in a range of applications including
optical communication, precision spectroscopy, optical coherence tomography (OCT), optical
frequency metrology, hyperspectral imaging, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and,
chemical and remote sensing. Hence the broadband SC generation is of strong motivation.
Supercontinuum (SC), is a process of generating broadband optical spectrum by launching
optical pulses into a nonlinear medium, continuous interaction of laser pulses with nonlinear
optical medium leads to the emission of a wider optical spectrum with a bandwidth many
times greater than the bandwidth of the launched pulses. The key nonlinear physical
phenomena involved in this processes are stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), modulation
instability (MI), cross-phase modulation (XPM), self-phase modulation (SPM), four-wave
mixing (FWM) and soliton related dynamics. The SC generation compromises of two parts: a
seed laser and a nonlinear medium. The seed laser can generate femtosecond (short) pulses,
picosecond or nanosecond (long) pulses or even continuous-wave (CW) laser. The nonlinear
media such as normal single-mode-fibre (SMF) or specialty fibres such as highly nonlinear
fibre (HNLF), highly nonlinear photonic crystal fibre (PCF), tapered fibres and soft-glass fibres
like ZBLAN (ZrF4-BaF2-LaF3-AlF3-NaF). In this project, the carbon-nanotube (CNT) based
saturable absorber (SA) is used for the realization of passively mode-locked femtosecond
erbium-doped fibre laser (EDFL) as a seed to the specialty fibres, to generate the broadband
SC generation and also to study the different aspects of spectral broadening phenomena
inside each specialty fibre. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the generation of CNT-SA-based
passively mode-locked femtosecond EDFL and generation of broadband SC spectrum from
specialty fibre.
The CNT-SA based passively mode-locked EDFL has achieved a pulse width of 620 fs with a
pulse repetition rate of 18 MHz at a center wavelength of 1565 nm with a 3-dB bandwidth of
5 nm. The output of the mode-locked laser pulse has pulse peak power of 18.5 W and average
power of 0.21 mW respectively at the stable mode-locked condition. Throughout this project,
the CNT-SA based passively mode-locked femtosecond EDFL is used as seed laser to
broadband SC spectrum from all the specialty fibres. For efficient activation of nonlinear
phenomena inside each specialty fibre and, also to study the variation of spectral broadening
with respect to the variation in input pulse power, the pulse power is further boosted through
the amplification using a pulsed erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA).
The spectral broadening inside a 60-meter-long PCF with respect to the variation in input
pulse power is observed. The input power to the PCF is varied from 0 dBm to 20 dBm and
achieved a maximum SC spectrum bandwidth of 1080 nm from the output of PCF spanning
from 1090 nm to 2170 nm. In the next step, the spectral broadening inside the HNLF is studied
with respect to the variation in input pulse power from 0 dBm to 20 dBm and obtained a
maximum SC spectrum bandwidth of 1400 nm covering from 1060 nm to 2460 nm. In addition
to input pulse power variation, here the length of HNLF is also varied and studied the effect
of the length variation on spectral broadening and SC spectrum bandwidth. The effect of
tapering also observed by applying tapering ratio of two on a short length of HNLF.
In order to overcome the limitations of silica-based fibres and to extend the SC spectrum
further towards mid-infrared (mid-IR) side, soft-glass ZBLAN fibre is considered. The input
pulse power to a 25-meter-long ZBLAN fibre is varied from 0 dBm to 25 dBm. A maximum SC
bandwidth of 2100 nm spectrum extending from 1100 nm to 3200 nm is observed from the
output of ZBLAN fibre. |
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