Mid-infrared supercontinuum covering the 1.4–13.3 μm molecular fingerprint region using ultra-high NA chalcogenide step-index fibre

By Christian Rosenberg Petersen, U. Møller, Irnis Kubat, Binbin Zhou, S. Dupont, J. Ramsay, T. Benson, S. Sujecki, N. Abdel-Moneim, Zhuoqi Tang and 3 more. Nature Photonics, 2014

857 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mid-infrared supercontinuum generation with a record-breaking spectral coverage of 1.4–13.3 µm is demonstrated by launching intense ultra-short pulses into short pieces of ultra-high numerical aperture step-index chalcogenide glass optical fibre consisting of a GaAsSe cladding and an As2Se3 core. The mid-infrared spectral region is of great technical and scientific interest because most molecules display fundamental vibrational absorptions in this region, leaving distinctive spectral fingerprints1,2. To date, the limitations of mid-infrared light sources such as thermal emitters, low-power laser diodes, quantum cascade lasers and synchrotron radiation have precluded mid-infrared applications where the spatial coherence, broad bandwidth, high brightness and portability of a supercontinuum laser are all required. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that launching intense ultra-short pulses with a central wavelength of either 4.5 μm or 6.3 μm into short pieces of ultra-high numerical-aperture step-index chalcogenide glass optical fibre generates a mid-infrared supercontinuum spanning 1.5 μm to 11.7 μm and 1.4 μm to 13.3 μm, respectively. This is the first experimental demonstration to truly reveal the potential of fibres to emit across the mid-infrared molecular ‘fingerprint region’, which is of key importance for applications such as early cancer diagnostics3, gas sensing2,4 and food quality control5.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54611bddaeef9637003516476644f0db82a968e2

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Citations in the corpus

Ultrafast supercontinuum generation in bulk condensed media (2017, positive): “Technological availability of highly nonlinear materials, such as tellurite and chalco-genide glasses, fostered the development of ultra-broadband fibre-based SC sources, which deliver continuous spectral coverage from the near-to mid-infrared spectral ranges (see, e.g. [ 3, 4]).”
Mid-infrared octave spanning supercontinuum generation to 8.5 μm in silicon-germanium waveguides (2018, methodology): “Finally, in terms of power consumption, all of our results were achieved using a coupled peak power (P0) comparable to that used to generate SC in the mid-IR (pumped around 4 μm) with SOS [29] and ChG [14], while being lower than in ChG fibers with similar cross sections [9,13].”