Supercontinuum generation

The development of tunable (ultrafast) excitation sources based on supercontinuum generation offers convincing alternatives to multiphoton excitation for confocal and other microscopes,... 

Schreiber, T., Limpert, J., Zellmer, H., Tunnermann, A. and Hansen, K. P. (2003). High average power supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers. Opt. Commun. 228, 71-8. 

Kudlinski, A., George, A. K., Knight, J. C., Rulkov, A. B., Popov, S. V. and Taylor, J. R. (2006). Zero-dispersion wavelength decreasing photonic crystal fibers for ultraviolet-extended supercontinuum generation. Opt. Express 14, 5715-22. 

The implications of varying the experimentally accessible parameters on both on filamentation and supercontinuum generation within media are discussed in the following. 

Supercontinuum generation, 82 Supercontinuum spectrum, 87 Suprathermal electrons, 167... 

FIGURE 7.5 Supercontinuum generation in a photonic crystal hber (PCF). (a) Schematic drawing of a PCF, showing the solid micrometer sized core surrounded by a periodic array of air-hlled holes, (b) Experimental demonstration of ultrabroad bandwidth generation from a standard 100 fs laser (PCF input, dashed curve) in only 12 mm of PCF. This spectrum (PCF output) has enough bandwidth to be compressed to sub-15 fs pulses (see text and Figure 7.7). 

Fig. 13.1. Supercontinuum generated in a femtosecond pulse propagating in air. Full curve was obtained from the full UPPE simulation while the other curves correspond to NEE equation simulated with two and three terms included in the dispersion operator...

Fig. 13.2. Spatial spectra of a supercontinuum generated in air. Left panel represents a solution obtained from UPPE, the right panels is a corresponding spectrum obtained from PCNLS. Artifacts in the spectrum around the wavenumbers that correspond to the twice the reference frequency are clearly visible...

Fig. 13.8. Artificial vs real water susceptibility used in comparative simulations designed to test the standard supercontinuum generation scenario for bulk media...

Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that the standard scenario for supercontinuum generation in bulk media is incomplete. Although it correctly identifies the key quantities (peak intensity, plasma density generation rate) and processes (collapse arrest, MPI), our numerical experiments demonstrate that it doesn t explain the supercontinuum spectral properties. 

S. L. Chin, A. Brodeur, S. Petit, O. G. Kosareva, V. P. Kandidov, Filamentation and supercontinuum generation during the propagation of powerful ultrashort laser pulses in optical media (white light laser), Journal of Nonlinear Optical Physics and Materials 8, 121 (1999)... 

J. Kasparian, R. Sauerbrey, D. Mondelain, S. Niedermeier, J. Yu, J.-P. Wolf, Y.-B. Andre, M. Franco, B. Prade, A. Mysyrowicz, S. Tzortzakis, M. Rodriguez, H. Wille, L. Woste, Infrared extension of the supercontinuum generated by fs-TW-laser pulses propagating in the atmosphere, Optics Letters 25, 1397-1399 (2000)... 

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