Supercontinuum generation in a random fiber laser structure

A novel supercontinuum (SC) generation structure based on a random fiber laser is demonstrated in this paper. The effect of the passive fiber length for spectrum boarding is analyzed and discussed. A near-infrared SC with 20 dB bandwidth of more than 500 nm can be generated with 1 km length of passive fiber under 11.13 W pump power. The experimental results show that shorter passive fiber length is beneficial for the SC broadening to long wavelength region. The long wavelength edge of the output SC with 200 m and 1930 m passive fiber are 1680 nm and 1375 nm respectively when the pump power is 11.13W. The results proved that random fiber lasers can be a novel, simple, low cost, low coherence, and robust near-infrared SC generation source.