Femtosecond supercontinuum generation around 1560 nm in hollow-core photonic crystal fibers filled with carbon tetrachloride

We investigated experimentally supercontinuum generation in hollow-core photonic crystal fibers with cores infiltrated with carbon tetrachloride. As a pump source, we used a standard fiber-based femtosecond laser with a central wavelength at 1560 nm and a pulse duration of 90 fs. The first investigated fiber has a zero-dispersion wavelength at 1740 nm and generates a supercontinuum in the wavelength range from 1350 to 1900 nm. The second fiber has a zero-dispersion wavelength at 1440 nm, and the observed supercontinuum spectrum ranges from 1000 to 1900 nm. We numerically analyzed coherence of simulated supercontinuum pulses and noted that the observed supercontinuum spectra had a potential for high coherence. While the dynamics of supercontinuum generation in each of the investigated cases was revealed to be in agreement with the established state of the art in nonlinear fiber optics, our results are the first demonstration of such dynamics, to the best of our knowledge, leading up to octave spanning supercontinuum spectra in liquid-filled hollow-core silica fibers under pumping with a small-footprint femtosecond laser. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America