2-10 mu m Mid-Infrared Supercontinuum Generation in Cascaded Optical Fibers: Experiment and Modelling

Supercontinuum (SC) generation towards the mid-infrared (MIR) range is an active field of research and development motivated by a wide range of applications including optical coherence tomography (OCT), material processing, optical sensing and absorption spectroscopy. In this work, we investigate mid-IR SC generation in a cascaded silica and soft-glass fiber system directly pumped with a commercially-available picosecond fiber laser operating in the telecommunications window at 1.55 mu m. This all-fiber system is shown to generate a flat broadband mid-IR-SC covering the entire range from 2 to 10 mu m with several tens of mW of output power. This technique paves the way for practical and robust broadband SC sources in the mid-IR without the requirement of mid-infrared pump sources or Thulium-doped fiber amplifiers. We also describe a fully-realistic numerical model used to simulate the nonlinear pulse propagation through the cascaded fiber system and use our numerical results to discuss the physical processes underlying the spectral broadening in the cascaded system.