Multi-octave coherent supercontinuum generation under anomalous dispersion regime in a ZBLAN-based master oscillator fiber amplifier

High energy fiber laser sources operating around the 2 μm center wavelength have been attracting considerable attention due to their potential applications in many areas such as spectroscopy and microscopy. As a huge advantage, thulium-doped fiber lasers can be pumped by commercially available laser diodes (LD) operating around 800 nm. This advantage makes such lasers very compact and attractive specifically for supercontinuum (SC) generation. Depending on the dispersion regime the properties of the SC can hugely vary. SC generation under normal dispersion regime is the most straightforward method to obtain highly coherent SC pulses but at the same time comes with the down side of limited achievable bandwidth. In contrast, it is well documented that the SC generation under anomalous dispersion would result in the expansion of the obtainable bandwidth [1] , which plays a critical role in applications. This comes at the cost of the pulse-to-pulse instability that is introduced to the source.