Numerical investigation on high power mid-infrared supercontinuum fiber lasers pumped at 3 mu m

作者：Wei Chen; Zhu Xiushan^*; Norwood Robert A; Song Feng; Peyghambarian N

来源：Optics Express, 2013, 21(24): 29488-29504.

DOI：10.1364/OE.21.029488

High power mid-infrared (mid-IR) supercontinuum (SC) laser sources in the 3-12 mu m region are of great interest for a variety of applications in many fields. Although various mid-IR SC laser sources have been proposed and investigated experimentally and theoretically in the past several years, power scaling of mid-IR SC lasers beyond 3 mu m with infrared edges extending beyond 7 mu m are still challenges because the wavelengths of most previously used pump sources are below 2 mu m. These problems can be solved with the recent development of mode-locked fiber lasers at 3 mu m. In this paper, high power mid-IR SC laser sources based on dispersion engineered tellurite and chalcogenide fibers and pumped by ultrafast lasers at 3 mu m are proposed and investigated. Our simulation results show that, when a W-type tellurite fiber with a zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) of 2.7 mu m is pumped at 2.78 mu m, the power proportion of the SC laser beyond 3 mu m can exceed 40% and the attainable SC output power of the proposed solid-cladding tellurite fiber is one order of magnitude higher than that of existing microstructured tellurite fibers. Our calculation also predicts that a very promising super-broadband mid-IR SC fiber laser source covering two atmospheric windows and molecules' "fingerprint" region can be obtained with a microstructured As2Se3 chalcogenide fiber pumped at 2.78 mu m.

• 出版日期2013-12-2
• 单位南开大学