By Chang Sun

All-fiber supercontinuum (SC) laser source has important applications in various fields such as laser radar, fiber communications, biomedical imaging and spectroscopy. In particular, hundreds of milliwatts SC source can be applied in biomedical imaging like fluorescence lifetime imaging, spectroscopy and optical coherence technology because it can improve the resolution of the image compared with other optical sources. In these areas, requirements of hundreds of milliwatts SC source are focused on bandwidth and flatness of spectrum, while the power in general application remains only hundreds of milliwatts. Currently, however, a supercontinuum that meets such requirements is reported rarely, because the nonlinear effects in PCF (photonic crystal fiber) causing supercontinuum generation is not easily produced at low power. Continue reading →