All Fibre Continuous Wave Supercontinuum Sources for fibre sensing purposes

Abstract

A supercontinuum light source is a wideband source obtained as the result of the broadening of a spectrally narrow pump source in a nonlinear medium. The high spectral brightness, large spectral width, tailored wavelength band of emission, and coherence make supercontinuun sources (SC) very attractive for photonics applications. The SCs generated with continuous wave (CW) pumps have the additional property that they present much higher spectral power density than the ones generated with pulsed pumps. We present three different supercontinuun sources tailored with conventional telecommunications fibers in order to obtain high power emission in the 1300 and 1550 nm spectral regions. We show that the spectral width, spectral shape and brightness of the supercontinua can be designed by a precise selection of the dispersion proprieties of the fibers used. This properties convert this type of sources in a very interesting candidate to be used in fiber sensing and photonic applications, for instance to avoid the need of amplification in the interrogation of remote Bragg gratings or to improve the resolution and dynamic range of optical coherence tomography setups.