Abstract

Pulsed fiber lasers operating near 3 µm have attracted considerable interest for various applications in the last decade. Those lasers are particularly interesting for biomedical applications such as vitreoretinal surgery, dental tissue ablation and cardiovascular surgery due to the strong water absorption peak near 2.9 µm. Depending on the pulse duration and peak power, they can also efficiently generate supercontinuum in the transparency window of the atmosphere between 3 µm and 5 µm, useful for probing the strong fundamental ro-vibrational resonances of atmospheric pollutants such as CH₄ and CO₂ over long distances.

© 2019 IEEE