Sub- and Nanosecond Pulsed Lasers Applied to the Generation of Broad Spectrum in Standard and Microstructured Optical Fibers

This chapter provides an experimental and theoretical overview of pulsed lasers applications focused on obtaining supercontinuum light source. Particular attention is paid to the supercontinuum generation with short piece of conventional and microstructured fiber. An investigation in the regime of long pulses is performed through pumping sources with pulse duration of 700 ps and 6 ns, showing that it is possible to obtain this kind of source in an economical way by using a microchip laser and a few meters of standard fiber, and achieve spectral broadening comparable with that one using a femtosecond laser. In this chapter the nonlinear effects in short lengths of optical fibers are analyzed, starting with modulation instability, stimulated Raman scattering, and stimulated Brillouin scattering. The interaction of these effects for obtaining supercontinuum light source is shown. It also shown that using a Nd:YAG laser with pulse duration of 6 ns and a repetition rate of 50 Hz to pump two joined photonic crystal fibers with different microstructure and dispersion is possible to obtain a spectral broadening with a greater flatness. Finally the spectral evolution of pumping pulses is presented for different input intensities and different lengths of standard and microstructured fibers.

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