Experimental performance comparison for various continuous-wave supercontinuum schemes: ring cavity and single pass structures

Abstract

We experimentally perform a comparative study on performance of three different schemes for generation of continuous-wave (CW) supercontinuum by use of nonlinear optical fiber, i.e. our proposed erbium-doped fiber (EDF)-based ring laser scheme incorporating a highly-nonlinear dispersion-shifted fiber (HNL-DSF), the Raman gain-based ring laser scheme incorporating an HNL-DSF, and the conventional scheme based on pump beam single propagation through an HNL-DSF. The three schemes show different physical mechanisms of supercontinuum evolution from a CW pump beam. In particular, our proposed EDF-based ring laser configuration is found to have a better relative intensity noise performance than the other two schemes.