Mid‐IR supercontinuum noise reduction using a short piece of normal dispersion fiber ‐ a general mechanism

Hansen, R. E., Smith, C. R., Moltke, A., Petersen, C. R., Raghuraman, S., Yoo, S. and Bang, O. (2023) Mid‐IR supercontinuum noise reduction using a short piece of normal dispersion fiber ‐ a general mechanism. Laser and Photonics Reviews, 17(6), 2200776. (doi: 10.1002/lpor.202200776)

Abstract

Mid-infrared (IR) supercontinuum (SC) lasers are important in applications such as pollution detection, stand-off detection, and non-destructive testing. The performance in many applications is limited by the noise level of the supercontinuum laser. High noise typically results in low sensitivities or a need for long integration times. In this paper, a simple technique to reduce the noise of high noise soliton-based SC sources is introduced by adding a short piece of normal dispersion fiber to force the spectrally distributed solitons to spectrally broaden through self-phase modulation and thereby overlap to average out the noise. The noise reduction is demonstrated experimentally and numerically using a ZBLAN fiber based mid-IR SC source and adding a short piece of highly nonlinear arsenic-sulfide fiber. However, the method is generally applicable to any soliton-based near-IR or mid-IR SC source. Its efficiency is underlined by experimentally comparing it to SC generation in fibers in which a second zero-dispersion wavelength provides the spectral alignment noise reduction mechanism.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The authors thank VILLUM FONDEN(2021 Villum Investigator project no. 00037822: Table-Top Synchrotrons), EU H2020-ICT-37 (TRIAGE project, 101015825), Innovation Fund Denmark through UVSUPER Grant No. 8090-00060A, EU Horizon-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01 (ZDZW project, 101057404), and EU Horizon-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01 (TURBO project, 101058054).
• Keywords: Chalcogenide glass fibers, self‐phase modulation, solitons, supercontinuum generation, supercontinuum noise reduction, ZBLAN fibers.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Yoo, Dr Seongwoo
• Authors: Hansen, R. E., Smith, C. R., Moltke, A., Petersen, C. R., Raghuraman, S., Yoo, S., and Bang, O.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering > Electronics and Nanoscale Engineering
• Journal Name: Laser and Photonics Reviews
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 1863-8880
• ISSN (Online): 1863-8899
• Published Online: 09 April 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Laser and Photonics Reviews 17(6):2200776
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons license