Abstract
Femtosecond fiber lasers together with nonlinear fibers are compact, reliable, all-fiber supercontinuum sources. Maintaining an all-fiber configuration, however, necessitates pulse compression in an optical fiber, which can lead to nonlinearities for subhundred femtosecond, nanojoule pulses. In this work we show that using large-mode-area fibers for pulse compression mitigates the nonlinearity, resulting in compressed pulses with significantly reduced satellite pulses. Consequently, supercontinua generated with these pulses are shown to have as much as a increase in coherence fringe contrast. By using a hybrid highly nonlinear fiber–photonic crystal fiber, the continuum can be extended to visible wavelengths while still maintaining high coherence.
© 2008 Optical Society of America
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