Supercontinuum Generation by Saturated Second-Order Nonlinear Interactions

Abstract

We propose a new approach to supercontinuum generation and carrier-envelope-offset detection based on saturated second-order nonlinear interactions in dispersion-engineered nanowaveguides. The technique developed here broadens the interacting harmonics by forming stable bifurcations of the pulse envelopes due to an interplay between phase-mismatch and pump depletion. We first present an intuitive heuristic model for spectral broadening by second-harmonic generation of femtosecond pulses, and show that this model agrees well with experiments. Then, having established strong agreement between theory and experiment, we develop scaling laws that determine the energy required to generate an octave of bandwidth as a function of input pulse duration, device length, and input pulse chirp. These scaling laws suggest that future realization based on this approach could enable supercontinuum generation with orders of magnitude less energy than current state-of-the-art devices.

9 pages, 5 figures

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• 11 TeraFLOPs per second photonic convolutional accelerator for deep learning optical neural networks
• Frequency comb spectroscopy
• Monolithic Ultrahigh-Q Lithium Niobate Microring Resonator
• Coherent two-octave-spanning supercontinuum generation in lithium-niobate waveguides
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Quasi-phase-matched up- and down-conversion in periodically poled layered semiconductors
• Two-optical-cycle pulses from nanophotonic two-color soliton compression