We present the pedestal-free thulium doped silica fiber with a large nanostructured core optimized for fiber lasers. The fiber is composed of over 6 thousand thulium doped silica nanorods with a ...diameter of 71 nm each which form a nanostructured step-index core. We study the influence of non-continuous distribution in nanoscale active areas on gain, beam quality, and fiber laser performance. The proof-of-concept fiber is effectively single mode for wavelength above 1.8 µm. We demonstrate the performance of the fiber in a laser setup pumped at 792 nm. Single mode laser emission with a slope efficiency of 29% at quasi-continuous output power of 4 W with M2 = 1.3 at the emission spectrum 1880-1925 nm is achieved.
Abstract
We developed a new kind of compact flat-surface nanostructured gradient index vortex phase mask, for the effective generation of optical vortex beams in broadband infrared wavelength range. ...A low-cost nanotechnological material method was employed for this work. The binary structure component consists of 17,557 nano-sized rods made of two lead–bismuth–gallium silicate glasses which were developed in-house. Those small rods are spatially arranged in such a way that, according to effective medium theory, the refractive index of this internal structure is constant in the radial direction and linearly changes following azimuthal angle. Numerical results demonstrated that a nanostructured vortex phase mask with a thickness of 19 μm can convert Gaussian beams into fundamental optical vortices over 290 nm wavelength bandwidth from 1275 to 1565 nm. This has been confirmed in experiments using three diode laser sources operating at 1310, 1550, and 1565 nm. The generation of vortex beams is verified through their uniform doughnut-like intensity distributions, clear astigmatic transformation patterns, and spiral as well as fork-like interferograms. This new flat-surface component can be directly mounted to an optical fiber tip for simplifying vortex generator systems as well as easier manipulation of the generated OVB in three-dimensional space.
In this paper we studied the effect of NaBO2 addition to a phase-separated alkali-free bioactive glass with a composition of 38.49 SiO2 • 36.07 CaO • 19.24 MgO • 5.61 P2O5 • 0.59 CaF2. Microscopy ...reveals binodal phase separation involving two Si-containing microphases with a droplet size of ∼200 μm, driven by the thermodynamic LLPS mechanism. The local environments and spatial distribution of silicate, phosphate, and fluoride ions in this phase-separated system were studied, using 29Si, 31P, 11B, 19F, 25Mg, and 23Na nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and infrared spectroscopy. The silicate units are dominantly of the metasilicate (Si2) type. The phosphate units exist mostly as orthophosphate (P0) while the borate is present in the form of pyroborate (B1). Multinuclear dipolar re-coupling experiments indicate that the minority components F, P, B and Na all occur within a common phase. Thus, atomic distribution scenarios involving the separation of these components into separate phases can be excluded. The 31P spin echo decay (SED) method was used along with Monte Carlo simulations to characterize the spatial distribution of the phosphate component. Based on the analysis, the phosphate component forms clusters of sizes 1-4 nm, which are embedded in an environment more dilute in phosphate, having a random distribution. While 19F SED results indicate that the fluoride ions do not form clusters and are close to randomly distributed, dipolar recoupling of 31P suggests a local environment resembling that of fluorapatite.
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Coherence of supercontinuum sources is critical for applications involving characterization of ultrafast or rarely occurring phenomena. With the demonstrated spectral coverage of supercontinuum ...extending from near-infrared to over 10 μm in a single nonlinear fiber, there has been a clear push for the bandwidth rather than for attempting to optimize the dynamic properties of the generated spectrum. In this work we provide an experimental assessment of the shot-to-shot noise performance of supercontinuum generation in two types of soft glass photonic crystal fibers. Phase coherence and intensity fluctuations are compared for the cases of an anomalous dispersion-pumped fiber and an all-normal dispersion fiber. With the use of the dispersive Fourier transformation method, we demonstrate that a factor of 100 improvement in signal-to-noise ratio is achieved in the normal-dispersion over anomalous dispersion-pumped fiber for 390 fs long pump pulses. A double-clad design of the photonic lattice of the fiber is further postulated to enable a pump-related seeding mechanism of normal-dispersion supercontinuum broadening under sub-picosecond pumping, which is otherwise known for similar noise characteristics as modulation instability driven, soliton-based spectra.
This study proposes a photonic crystal fiber made of fused silica glass, with the core infiltrated with tetrachloroethylene (C
2
Cl
4
) as a new source of supercontinuum (SC) spectrum. We studied ...numerically the guiding properties of the several different fiber structures in terms of characteristic dispersion, mode area, and attenuation of the fundamental mode. Based on the results, the structural geometries of three C
2
Cl
4
-core photonic crystal fibers were optimized in order to support the broadband SC generations. The first fiber structure with lattice constant 1.5 μm and filling factor 0.4 operates in all-normal dispersion. The SC with a broadened spectral bandwidth of 0.8–2 μm is generated by a pump pulse with a central wavelength of 1.56 μm, 90 fs duration and energy of 1.5 nJ. The second proposed structure, with lattice constant 4.0 μm and filling factor 0.45, performs an anomalous dispersion for wavelengths longer than 1.55 μm. With the same pump pulse as the first fiber, we obtained the coherence SC spectrum in an anomalous dispersion range with wavelength range from 1 to 2 μm. Meanwhile, the third selected fiber (lattice constant 1.5 μm, filling factor 0.55) has two zero dispersion wavelengths at 1.04 μm and 1.82 μm. The octave-spanning of the SC spectrum formed in this fiber was achieved in the wavelength range of 0.7–2.4 μm with an input pulse whose optical properties are 1.03 μm wavelength, 120 fs duration and energy of 2 nJ. Those fibers would be good candidates for all-fiber SC sources as cost-effective alternatives to glass core fibers.
We demonstrate that commercially available poly(D,L-lactic acid) (PDLLA) is a suitable material for the fabrication of biodegradable optical fibers with a standard heat drawing process. To do so we ...report on the chemical and optical characterization of the material. We address the influence of the polymer processing on the molecular weight and thermal properties of the polymer following the preparation of the polymer preforms and the fiber optic drawing process. We show that cutback measurements of the first optical fibers drawn from PDLLA return an attenuation coefficient as low as 0.11 dB/cm at 772 nm, which is the lowest loss reported this far for optical fibers drawn from bio-resorbable material. We also report on the dispersion characteristics of PDLLA, and we find that the thermo-optic coefficient is in the range of -10 -4 °C -1 . Finally, we studied the degradation of PDLLA fibers in vitro, revealing that fibers with the largest diameter of 600 μm degrade faster than those with smaller diameters of 300 and 200 μm and feature more than 84% molecular weight loss over a period of 3 months. The evolution of the optical loss of the fibers as a function of time during immersion in phosphate-buffered saline indicates that these devices are potential candidates for use in photodynamic therapy-like application scenarios.
The soliton, the eigen-solution of nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE), has been investigated in many branches of physics. The first prediction of a soliton in optical fiber could be dated back to ...1973. Since then, numerous theoretical and experimental works on solitons have been carried out, including soliton communication and soliton generation in fiber lasers. However, due to the constraints of hardware and digital signal processing methods, research on solitons have been stalled for decades. Recently, the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) has attracted significant attention in the field of optical fiber communications and soliton-based signal processing, which provides a powerful mathematical framework for analyzing and understanding the behavior of solitons in optical fibers, enabling the development of novel signal processing techniques. The NFT technique has brought the soliton back to life. It has been widely recognized that in nonlinear frequency domain, the nonlinear crosstalk resulting from the Kerr effect is practically negligible, and fiber nonlinearity damage caused by the Kerr effect can be accounted for as a linear transform factor. Moreover, NFT has been demonstrated for the analysis of laser radiation, highlighting its potential in characterizing ultrafast pulses in the nonlinear frequency domain. In this submission, we review the advancements of NFT concerning both in soliton communication and characterization, focusing on practical implementation aspects. With many practical implementation aspects still being open, our mini review is aimed to assist researchers in evaluating the potential, identifying challenges, and envisioning future directions in NFT-based signal processing technologies. And wake up the sleeping beauty – the soliton!
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