Abstract

Supercontinuum (SC) generation in optical fibers and waveguides is a phenomenon of increasing interest that has found applications in fields like time-resolved spectroscopy, ultrashort pulse compression, multiwavelength optical sources for WDM and optical frequency metrology. Most of the experiments performed up to now have been accomplished using femtosecond or picosecond-pulsed laser sources and special fibers such as highly-nonlinear photonic crystal fibers. Supercontinuum generation using continuous-wave laser sources was demonstrated only recently, but the initial results demonstrate that high power density (> 1 mW/nm), broadband supercontinuums (more than 250 nm) can be achieved with good long-term stability. In this paper we show different experimental setups to produce continuous-wave supercontinuums in optical fibers. We show how the supercontinuum varies depending upon the pump source used in the experiment. We believe that such an incoherent source can have very interesting applications in optical fiber and component characterization, fiber sensing and optical coherence tomography for biomedical applications. As a sample application, we show that this source can be used to measure polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in optical fibers very accurately and with an extremely large dynamic range (> 200 km).