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Supercontinuum generation in submicrometer diameter silica fibers

Rafael R. Gattass, Geoffry T. Svacha, Limin Tong, and Eric Mazur

Open Access Open Access

Abstract

Silica nanowires provide strong mode confinement in a cylindrical silica-core/air-cladding geometry and serve a model system for studying nonlinear propagation of short optical pulses inside fibers. We report on the fiber diameter dependence of the supercontinuum generated by femtosecond laser pulses in silica fiber tapers with average diameters in the range of 200 nm to 1200 nm. We observe a strong diameter-dependence of the spectral broadening, which can be attributed to the fiber’s diameter-dependent dispersion and nonlinearity. The short interaction length (less than 20 mm) and the low energy threshold for supercontinuum generation (about 1 nJ) make tapered fibers with diameters between 400 nm and 800 nm an ideal source of coherent white-light source in nanophotonics.

©2006 Optical Society of America

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Figures (4)
Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Diameter profiles of six representative fibers. The average diameters of the submicrometer part of the fiber are: (a) 360 nm, (b) 445 nm, (c) 525 nm, (d) 700 nm, (e) 850 nm, (f) 1200 nm. The dashed horizontal lines mark the value of the average diameter.

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Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Supercontinuum spectra for the six fibers of Fig. 1. The transmitted pulse energies are: (a) 0.3 nJ, (b) 4 nJ, (c) 6 nJ, (d) 4 nJ, (e) 7 nJ and (f) 2.5 nJ.

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Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Energy depencence of the supercontinuum spectrum generated by the 1200-nm minimum diameter fiber in Fig. 2(f).

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Fig. 4.
Fig. 4. Diameter dependence of the dispersion coefficient (dashed curve) and nonlinearity (solid curve) for 800-nm light. The dispersion D is obtained from Ref. [14]; the effective nonlinearity γ from Ref. [20]. The black triangles indicate the diameters of the fibers from Figs. 1 and 2.

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Tables (1)

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Table 1. Physical parameters relevant to the propagation of intense 800-nm laser pulses in fibers with (sub)micrometer average diameters. The dispersion D is obtained from Ref. [14]; the effective nonlinearity γ from Ref. [20] and the dispersion length LD , the nonlinear length LNL and the soliton number N from Ref. [22]. The gray area marks the region of anomalous dispersion for 800-nm light.

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