Supercontinuum generation in a photonic crystal fiber pumped by a gain-switched high-power fiber laser

Supercontinuum (SC) generation in nonlinear photonic crystal fibers (NLF) using continuous-wave (CW) fiber lasers for pumping has been studied before[1,2]. The advantages of CW-SC are high spectral smoothness, high spectral power density, simplicity of the system, and lower noise than the more common picosecond-pumped SC.

The cost of these features is increased nonlinear fiber lengths due to less efficient nonlinear processes at the lower power levels. Especially, the generation of light in the visible wavelength range has been a challenge. This has previously been tackled by increasing the nonlinearity of the fiber, zero dispersion shifting along the fiber length, and using 200 m of NLF[1], or alternatively using extremely high powers of 100's of Watts[2].