Abstract

Supercontinuum (SC) sources in mid-infrared (mid-IR) are currently of great interest among many researchers owing to their various applications including in remote sensing and imaging [1]. One of the main challenges here is choosing an appropriate pump source, as the available mid-IR sources are usually highly complex and often are not readily available. Moreover, soft-glass materials that are widely adopted for guiding SC in mid-IR have relatively poor thermal properties, imposing a limit on the intensity of the generated SC. A solution to the latter issue is to use a hollow-core fiber, and guide the light in the hollow region to minimize the material absorption. This allows the use of silica as the fiber material, which otherwise would be unsuitable for mid-IR applications due to its high loss in this spectral region. The necessary nonlinearity can be induced by filling the hollow-core with gas [2].

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