We experimentally and numerically demonstrate a simple and general technique to reduce the noise of modulational instability and soliton-based broadband supercontinuum lasers at the pulse-to-pulse level. Because of the requirement of low cost and high average power, such supercontinuum lasers constitute 99% of today’s commercially available supercontinuum lasers. The technique relies on adding a short normal dispersion fiber to force the spectrally and temporally distributed solitons to spectrally broaden through self-phase modulation (SPM) and thereby overlap to average out the noise. We experimentally demonstrate that this SPM technique provides significant noise reduction over a broad bandwidth.
Mid-infrared supercontinuum lasers are spatially coherent and can cover a wide spectral range of 2-10 μm. This makes them useful in many important applications, such as spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography. 2.8 μm ultrafast lasers are an important emerging pump wavelength for mid-infrared supercontinuum sources. We present our work on MHz repetition rate 2.8 μm erbium-doped ZBLAN fiber lasers using a MOPA architecture to boost the output power. Performing pulse break-up in a highly Germania-doped silica fiber and pumping this spectrum into a highly nonlinear sulfide fiber, we demonstrate both the noise and bandwidth achievable with the novel fiber cascade. We acknowledge funding from Villum Fonden (2021 Villum Investigator project no. 00037822: Table-Top Synchrotrons).
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