Mid‐IR Supercontinuum Noise Reduction Using a Short Piece of Normal Dispersion Fiber ‐ A General Mechanism

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Abstract
Mid‐infrared (IR) supercontinuum (SC) lasers are important in applications such as pollution detection, stand‐off detection, and non‐destructive testing. The performance in many applications is limited by the noise level of the supercontinuum laser. High noise typically results in low sensitivities or a need for long integration times. In this paper, a simple technique to reduce the noise of high noise soliton‐based SC sources is introduced by adding a short piece of normal dispersion fiber to force the spectrally distributed solitons to spectrally broaden through self‐phase modulation and thereby overlap to average out the noise. The noise reduction is demonstrated experimentally and numerically using a ZBLAN fiber based mid‐IR SC source and adding a short piece of highly nonlinear arsenic‐sulfide fiber. However, the method is generally applicable to any soliton‐based near‐IR or mid‐IR SC source. Its efficiency is underlined by experimentally comparing it to SC generation in fibers in which a second zero‐dispersion wavelength provides the spectral alignment noise reduction mechanism.

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