Soliton filtering from a supercontinuum: A tunable femtosecond pulse source

Abstract

In this article we report experimental results related with the generation of a supercontinuum in a microstructured fiber, from which the soliton with the longest wavelength is filtered out of the continuum and is used to construct a tunable ultrashort pulses source by varying the pump power. Pulses of an 80 fs duration (FWHM) from a Ti:sapphire oscillator were input into a 2 m long fiber to generate the continuum. The duration of the solitons at the fiber output was preserved by using a zero dispersion filtering system, which selected the longest wavelength soliton, while avoiding temporal spreading of the solitons. We present a complete characterization of the filtered pulses that are continuously tunable in the 850-1100 nm range. We also show that the experimental results have a qualitative agreement with theory. An important property of the proposed near-infrared pulsed source is that the soliton pulse energies obtained after filtering are large enough for applications in nonlinear microscopy.