Phys.org March 13, 2023
Supercontinuum lasers are able to produce a continuous spectrum of color and can therefore appear white. To generate the wide bandwidth of colors, supercontinuum lasers have a high peak power consumption, they are enormous and have to be stabilized in a laboratory. Researchers in the Netherlands have developed a scheme where the input energy requirements for integrated supercontinuum generation are drastically lowered by orders of magnitude for bandwidth generation of the order of 500–1000 nm. They achieved an efficiency enhancement by factors reaching 2800 through sign-alternating dispersion in a CMOS-compatible silicon nitride waveguide. They showed that the pulse energy requirement for large-bandwidth supercontinuum generation at high spectral power was lowered from nanojoules to 6 picojoules. The lowered pulse energy requirements enabled that chip-integrated laser sources, such as mode-locked heterogeneously or hybrid-integrated diode lasers, can be used as a pump source, enabling fully integrated on-chip high-bandwidth supercontinuum sources… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Sign-alternated-dispersion silicon nitride waveguides for efficient SCG. Credit: Advanced Photonics Research, Early View 2200296, 20 January 2023Â