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

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