We report a high pulse, all-fiber supercontinuum source generated by pumping 2 ns long pulses at 100kHz from an ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier (YDFA) into a 15 m tapered photonics crystal fiber (PCF). The YDFA operates at 1066 nm, and the zero-dispersion wavelength of the PCF is at 1040 nm. The PCF is a 15 µm core at the input, tapered down to 5 µm at the output. The tapering is done such that the core-pitch ratio is maintained along the length of the fiber used. The resulting supercontinuum spans from 450 nm to 2400 nm, with a total pulse energy of more than 7uJ. The supercontinuum covers the visible spectrum making it useful for applications that require substantial pulse energies such as photoacoustic tomography.
Supercontinuum (SC) lasers are of high interest for applications like multispectral photoacoustic imaging (MSPAI), where the wide optical bandwidth of the SC laser system facilitates functional investigations on top of the structural information of various endogenous agents inside the human body. The current work addresses a promising attempt at devising high pulse energy SC laser source using telecom-range diode laser systems and few meters of standard single-mode fibers for various MSPAI applications in near-infrared (NIR) and extended-NIR wavelength regions.
An all-fiberized tunable repetition rate (50kHz-10MHz) SC source for photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) is developed. OCT is a scattering based imaging technique, requiring low spectral noise. Noise level requirement in OCT is usually mitigated using high repetition rate (MHz) laser sources. On the other hand, PAM is a hybrid imaging modality based on optical absorption that requires high pulse energies, thus, sources operating at lower repetition rates (kHz) are preferred. Nevertheless, it is always important to quantify and understand the RIN dynamics of the SC sources for good quality PAM and OCT images.
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