Chirped-pulse supercontinuum generation with a long-cavity Ti:sapphire oscillator

We demonstrate chirped-pulse supercontinuum generation in a conventional fibre with a relatively narrowband, long-cavity, chirped-pulse Ti:sapphire oscillator delivering 200 nJ pulses. The inherent chirp of the outcoupled pulses were overcompensated by a 4-prism compressor to overcome damage threshold problems at the fibre entrance. The resulting fibre output spectrum corresponds to a pulse length of 7 fs in the transform-limit. The experimentally observed highly efficient spectral broadening process of negatively chirped pulses in the fibre is supported by simulation data.