Full Bandwidth Measurement of Supercontinuum Spectral Phase Coherence in Long Pulse Regime

Abstract

This article reports that spectral phase coherence in the supercontinuum in long pulse regime can be measured simply and effectively by using an interference technique with the help of a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. It is also demonstrated that chromatic dispersion on the fringe visibility of interference spectral patterns is overcome in the setup. The technique is applied to characterize supercontinuum spectral phase coherence in a highly non-linear optical fiber with different input conditions: unseeded, coherent seeded, and incoherent seeded picosecond pumps. The results confirm the phase coherence characteristic predicted theoretically in previous studies.

Keywords:

• modulation instability
• non-linear optics
• phase coherence
• supercontinuum generation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Di Yang

Di Yang was born in Hu Bei Province, China, in 1987. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Her main research focuses on investigation of non-linear optics in fiber lasers.

Duc Minh Nguyen

Duc Minh Nguyen received his Ph.D in non-linear optics in 2011 at University of Rennes 1 in France. From November 2011 to October 2013, he worked at the Institute of Femto-st, University of Franche-Comté, France, as a post-doctoral research fellow; his research during this period focused on the study of the amplification parametric effect and the Brillouin effect in the photonic crystal fibers as well as their applications, such as distributed Brillouin sensors. He has also worked on intriguing links between ocean rogue waves and non-linear optics, more specifically, studying different kinds of soliton (Perregine, Kuznetsov-Ma, etc.) in non-linear Schrödinger equations as well as real-time measurements techniques of ultrashort laser pulses. He is currently a senior research fellow in the CNRS International Thales Research Alliance (CINRA) and a research project leader at Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies (CDPT), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Cesare Soci

Cesare Soci received both his Laureat degree (2000) and Ph.D. in physics (2005) from the University of Pavia, Italy. From 2005 to 2006, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids at University of California, Santa Barbara, and from 2006 to 2009 at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of California, San Diego. In 2009, he joined Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as an assistant professor at the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS) and Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE). He is currently the deputy director of the Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies.

Xuan Quyen Dinh

Xuan Quyen Dinh received his Ph.D in physics in 2007 at Ecole normale Supérieur de Cachan in France. He is now the deputy director of CNRS International Thales Research Alliance (CINRA) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Ming Tang

Ming Tang received his B. Eng. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2001 and his Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, Singapore, in 2005. His postdoctoral research in Network Technology Research Centre (NTRC) was focused on the optical fiber amplifiers, high-power fiber lasers, non-linear fiber optics, and all-optical signal processing. From February 2009, he was with the Tera-Photonics Group led by Prof. H. Ito in Riken, Wako, Japan, as a research scientist conducting research on terahertz-wave generation, detection, and application using non-linear optical technologies. Since March 2011, he has been a professor in the School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, HUST, Wuhan, China. He has published more than 70 technical papers in international recognized journals and conferences, and he serves as a regular reviewer for such journals as IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, and Optical Society of America (OSA) publications. He has been a member of the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS; now IEEE Photonics Society) since 2001.

Ping Perry Shum

Ping Perry Shum received his B. Eng. and Ph.D. in electronic and electrical engineering from University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 1991 and 1995, respectively. He was an honorary postdoctoral research fellow in University of Birmingham. In 1996, he was involved in research of semiconductor laser and high-speed optical laser communication in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong University, as a visiting research fellow. In July 1997, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, Optoelectronics Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. In 1999, he joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Since 2002, he has been appointed as the director of the Network Technology Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University. From 2010, he was an adjunct professor in Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) and School of Optoelectronics Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. He has published more than 400 international journal and conference papers. His research interests include optical communications, non-linear waveguide modeling, and fiber-based technology. He received the Singapore National Academy of Science Young Scientist Award in 2002 for his contributions on next-generation optical communication technology.