Noise Fingerprints of Fiber Supercontinuum Sources

Supercontinuum (SC) sources based on nonlinear spectral broadening of ultrashort pulses in specialty optical fibers have become an indispensable tool in a diverse range of application fields such as biomedical imaging, precision spectroscopy, and ultrafast photonics. After the initial race to maximize their spectral bandwidth and coverage, the noise properties of SC sources have recently shifted into focus. The large pulse-to-pulse fluctuations and correspondingly large relative intensity noise (RIN) present in commercial SC sources strongly limit the sensitivity, precision or resolution of many applications [1] . Recent work suggests that the dispersion engineering of the nonlinear fiber plays an important role for the resulting SC noise properties, as all-normal dispersion (ANDi) fibers suppress the noise-amplifying nonlinear processes that typically dominate the spectral broadening in their anomalously pumped counterparts [2] , [3] .