Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction and history
- 2 Supercontinuum generation in microstructure fibers – a historical note
- 3 Nonlinear fibre optics overview
- 4 Fibre supercontinuum generation overview
- 5 Silica fibres for supercontinuum generation
- 6 Supercontinuum generation and nonlinearity in soft glass fibres
- 7 Increasing the blue-shift of a picosecond pumped supercontinuum
- 8 Continuous wave supercontinuum generation
- 9 Theory of supercontinuum and interaction of solitons with dispersive waves
- 10 Interaction of four-wave mixing and stimulated Raman scattering in optical fibers
- 11 Nonlinear optics in emerging waveguides: revised fundamentals and implications
- 12 Supercontinuum generation in dispersion-varying fibers
- 13 Supercontinuum generation in chalcogenide glass waveguides
- 14 Supercontinuum generation for carrier-envelope phase stabilization of mode-locked lasers
- 15 Biophotonics applications of supercontinuum generation
- 16 Fiber sources of tailored supercontinuum in nonlinear microspectroscopy and imaging
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction and history
- 2 Supercontinuum generation in microstructure fibers – a historical note
- 3 Nonlinear fibre optics overview
- 4 Fibre supercontinuum generation overview
- 5 Silica fibres for supercontinuum generation
- 6 Supercontinuum generation and nonlinearity in soft glass fibres
- 7 Increasing the blue-shift of a picosecond pumped supercontinuum
- 8 Continuous wave supercontinuum generation
- 9 Theory of supercontinuum and interaction of solitons with dispersive waves
- 10 Interaction of four-wave mixing and stimulated Raman scattering in optical fibers
- 11 Nonlinear optics in emerging waveguides: revised fundamentals and implications
- 12 Supercontinuum generation in dispersion-varying fibers
- 13 Supercontinuum generation in chalcogenide glass waveguides
- 14 Supercontinuum generation for carrier-envelope phase stabilization of mode-locked lasers
- 15 Biophotonics applications of supercontinuum generation
- 16 Fiber sources of tailored supercontinuum in nonlinear microspectroscopy and imaging
- Index
Summary
Spectral broadening and the generation of new frequency components is an inherent feature of nonlinear optics, and has been studied in both bulk media and optical fiber waveguides since the 1960s. However, it was not until the early 1970s that the mechanism was widely applied to provide an extended “white-light” source for time resolved spectroscopy, which was later coined “a supercontinuum” by the Alfano group. Subsequent developments in the late 1970s in low-loss optical fibers with conventional structures for telecommunications led to the introduction of fiber as an ideal platform for supercontinuum generation. At the same time, the development of optical soliton physics throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s laid the theoretical foundation and established all the experimental mechanisms required for the production of this versatile source. Despite this progress, however, extensive laboratory deployment remained inhibited by unwieldy pump sources and unreliable system integration.
The advent of photonic crystal fiber in the late 1990s, together with developments in efficient high power and short pulse fiber lasers, fuelled a revolution in the generation of ultrabroadband high brightness optical spectra through the process of supercontinuum generation. Experiments using photonic crystal fiber in 1999–2000 attracted widespread interest and excitement because of the combination of high power, high coherence and the possibility to generate spectra spanning more than an octave. Moreover, the design freedom of photonic crystal fiber allowed supercontinuum generation to be optimized to the wider range of available pump sources, and experiments reported broadband spectra covering the complete window of transmission of silica based fiber using input pulses with durations ranging from several nanoseconds to several tens of femtoseconds, as well as high power continuous wave sources.
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- Information
- Supercontinuum Generation in Optical Fibers , pp. xi - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010