Supercontinuum generation in microstructured fibers made of heavy metal oxide glass

The NIR and mid IR supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibres are attractive light sources for sensing and spectroscopy applications, since it provides a high brightness, good beam quality source and can be offered as a compact, ready-to-use device. Most of the research work related to supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibres has to date been focused on silica based fibres limited to the visible and near infrared (NIR) ranges up to 2 μm. It has been shown that some groups of soft glasses can undergo multiple thermal processing steps without degradation and possess a high transmission in the mid IR range as well as a high effective nonlinearity, making them highly suited for photonic crystal fibre development in the area of NIR and mid IR supercontinuum generation. The use of the tellurite and heavy metal oxide glasses offer an interesting trade-off between high nonlinearity, transmission bandwidth, mechanical properties and fabrication requirements. Recently several successful realizations of broadband IR supercontinuum with these type of glasses have been reported in both, all-normal and anomalous, dispersion regimes.