A new generation of low-noise fiber supercontinuum (SC) sources is currently emerging, driven by the constantly increasing demands of spectroscopy, advanced microscopy, and ultrafast photonics applications for highly stable broadband coherent light sources. Due to the fast-paced progress of sensitivity and speed of spectroscopic detection and imaging techniques, the noise properties, shot-to-shot stability and temporal characteristics of fiber-based SC sources are now becoming increasingly relevant.

In this work, Etienne Genier and coauthors present an octave-spanning, highly coherent SC fiber laser at visible and near-IR wavelengths with relative intensity noise of only 0.5%, about two orders of magnitude lower than typical commercial SC sources and one of the lowest values ever reported. They achieved this by fabricating a highly birefringent all-normal dispersion (ANDi) photonic crystal fiber, a design that effectively suppresses noise-amplifying nonlinear effects under femtosecond pumping. The source exhibits superb spectral flatness, high spectral power density of 0.4 mW/nm, high polarization extinction ratio of 17 dB, and a simple temporal pulse shape with near-linear chirp. These results impressively illustrate the potential of ANDi SC sources for applications, which so far were not able to use conventional, soliton-based fiber SC sources due to their noise or complex temporal pulse shape.

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