Optical frequency comb generation with a flat-top spectrum from a mode-locked Yb fiber laser

We present an ultrabroadband supercontinuum (SC) frequency comb generation covering the optical spectrum more than 1.2 octave from 570 nm to 1350 nm with a near flat-top power spectrum by using a mode-locked Yb fiber laser at 1030 nm as a master oscillator (MO). The repetition rate of the MO that has a spectral-width of 28 nm is 152 MHz and is phase-locked to a reference frequency synthesizer. A power amplifier is used to boost up the output power up to 1.3 W and the positively chirped amplified pulses are compressed by using a transmission grating pair. We used a commercially-available 10-cm long photonic crystal fiber that has two zero-dispersion wavelengths at 800 nm and 1093 nm, respectively, to generate an ultrabroadband SC frequency comb. Optical spectrum depending on the frequency chirp and pulse-width of the amplified pulses are analyzed to find an optimum coupling power as well as an optimum chirp parameter. We found that a dimensionless chirp parameter of 8.6 and a pulse-width of 517 fs for a chirped Gaussian pulse resulted in the optimum spectrum width of 1.2 octave.