High Power Near-infrared Supercontinuum Generation in All-fiber Polarization-maintaining Erbium-doped Amplifier

We demonstrate a high-power all-fiber polarizationmaintaining near-infrared supercontinuum laser. The system includes oscillator, stretcher and four-stage amplifiers which are built entirely based on PM commercial silica fibers and devices. The PM oscillator of system is a mode-locked fiber laser based on nonlinear amplified loop mirror mechanism generating pulses with an average output power and a repetition rate of 1.2 mW and 42.2 MHz respectively. After pulse broadening by a 150 m long PM dispersion compensating fiber, the seed pulse laser is gradually delivered into the four-stage PM power amplifier for power boost. The SC is generated in the main amplifier without the need for additional nonlinear stage. The SC emission is characterized between 1524 nm and 1693 nm with the average power of 31.6 W, showing the flat spectrum with 15 dB uniformity was obtained at 1544–1668 nm wavelength region. The laser source delivers near-infrared SC from an entirely fiberized, fusion spliced system without any free-space optics, which can provide robust and stable SC generation.