Generation of a spectrum with high flatness and high bandwidth in a short length of telecom fiber using microchip laser J.C. Hernandez-Garcia a,b,n , J.M. Estudillo-Ayala a , O. Pottiez b , R. Rojas-Laguna a , R.I. Mata-Chavez c , A. Gonzalez-Garcia d a Departamento de Electronica, Division de Ingenierias Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Universidad de Guanajuato, Carretera Salamanca-Valle de Santiago Km 3.5 þ1.8Km, Comunidad de Palo Blanco, Salamanca, Gto. 36885, Mexico b Centro de Investigaciones en Optica (CIO), Loma del Bosque 115, Col. Lomas del Campestre, Leon, Gto. 37150, Mexico c Departamento de Estudios Multidisciplinarios, Division de Ingenierias Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Universidad de Guanajuato, Av. Universidad s/n, Col. Yacatitas, Yuriria, Gto. Mexico d Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica Optica y Electronica, Luis Enrique Erro No. 1, Sta. Ma. Tonantzintla, Puebla, Pue. 72840, Mexico article info Article history: Received 31 May 2012 Received in revised form 16 November 2012 Accepted 18 November 2012 Available online 20 December 2012 Keywords: Supercontinuum generation Fiber optics Nonlinear optics abstract In this work, we studied experimentally the generation of a supercontinuum spectrum induced in a piece of standard single-mode fiber using pulses from a microchip laser. For different values of fiber length, we obtained spectra with high flatness in visible and IR regions. The possibility to generate a spectrum with a high flatness and spectral width of more than 1100 nm (600 nm to over 1700 nm) in relatively short lengths of telecom fiber ( 57 m), using as the pump pulses with no more than a few kW peak power at a non-zero-dispersion wavelength, is attributed to the peculiar properties of the pulses generated by the pump source. The physical processes leading to the formation of the supercontinuum spectrum were studied by monitoring the growth of the spectrum while increasing the input power. The coupling efficiency between the microchip laser and the telecom fiber helped us obtain a very wide spectrum. This work shows that the use of conventional fiber for supercontinuum generation can be viewed as a cheap and efficient option, in particular for applications like optical metrology, coherence tomography and low noise sources for the characterization of devices. & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction For the production of new types of optical fibers such as photonic crystal fiber (PCF), a high-cost technology and expensive laboratory equipment are usually required. Supercontinuum gen- eration through standard fiber is a topic that has not been analyzed in detail, however, and the recent development of devices capable of providing the power required to induce intense nonlinear phenomena in telecom fibers opens new perspectives for supercontinuum generation in this type of fiber. The progress in the field of supercontinuum generation to a large measure is due to the remarkable advancement in the features provided by new pumping sources, such as a large spectral width and a high level of power provided, which can be found in particular in a microchip laser in the ps regime. Supercontinuum generation involves a series of nonlinear phenomena, such as modulation instability (MI), four wave mixing (FWM), self-phase and cross-phase modulation (SPM and XPM), as shown in various papers published about the topic [1–3]. The propagation media to generate a supercontinuum spectrum can be a PCF, highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF), zero dispersion fiber (ZDF) or standard fiber. In general, the phenom- ena described above are the result of the interaction between nonlinear and dispersive effects [4]. Once solitons are formed, Raman self-frequency shift (SFS) takes place, resulting in a widening of the input spectrum to longer wavelengths in the order of several tens or hundreds of nm. With the objective of understanding the importance of the experimental results obtained in this work, we presented their advantages compared with results reported in recent papers. After 2010, with the boom of the studies of supercontinuum generation in standard fiber, different works have been published, which can be used as a reference point for the work presented in this paper. In many of those works, long sections of fiber or special fibers (HNLF, fiber gratings or microstructured fibers) are used, which have a large economic cost. The studies presented by Kobtsev are based on an ns ultralong high-energy fiber laser with Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/optcom Optics Communications 0030-4018/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.optcom.2012.11.076 n Corresponding author at: Departamento de Electronica, Division de Ingenierias Campus Irapuato-Salamanca, Universidad de Guanajuato, Carretera Salamanca-Valle, de Santiago Km 3.5þ1.8Km, Comunidad de Palo Blanco, Salamanca, Gto. 36885, Mexico. E-mail address: jchernandez@ugto.mx (J.C. Hernandez-Garcia). Optics Communications 292 (2013) 126–130