Deep-blue supercontinnum sources with optimum taper profiles – verification of GAM

We use an asymmetric 2 m draw-tower photonic crystal fiber taper to demonstrate that the taper profile needs careful optimisation if you want to develop a supercontinuum light source with as much power as possible in the blue edge of the spectrum. In particular we show, that for a given taper length, the downtapering should be as long as possible.

We argue how this may be explained by the concept of group-acceleration mismatch (GAM) and we confirm the results using conventional symmetrical short tapers made on a taper station, which have varying downtapering lengths.