Supercontinuum Comb Generation Using Optical Pulse Synthesizer and Highly Nonlinear Dispersion-Shifted Fiber

We propose a novel supercontinuum (SC) generation technology using an optical pulse synthesizer and highly nonlinear dispersion-shifted fiber. The optical pulse synthesizer enables us to reshape seed pulses optimized for broadband SC generation. 25.0 and 12.5GHz SC combs were successfully generated by propagating synthesized seed pulses in the highly nonlinear fiber. We investigated how seed pulse conditions including shape, peak power, repetition rate, and center wavelength affect SC spectral bandwidth. We also evaluated interferometric signal waveforms from a Michelson interferometer using the generated SC comb as the light source. Interferometric peak width improved to 35.5 mu m when peak power reached 7.9 W for the Gaussian pulse-based SC comb. Numerical simulation results almost agreed with experimental results. The difference between SC combs generated from Gaussian and sech(2) pulses was confirmed by the simulations. (C) 2009 The Japan Society of Applied Physics