Supercontinuum

As supercontinuum laser white light or laser light is known, which has an extremely broadened optical spectrum. While the laser light is generally relatively narrow, a super continuum may include a frequency range of more than an octave.

Supercontinua can be caused by glass fibers at high intensities by exploiting nonlinear effects in the channeling of laser beams, but also focusing in air is sufficient to even out. Most used one intense light pulses of femtosecond lasers. However, the use of pulses of significantly greater duration can exhibit the desired broadening. Long fibers even in a continuous wave laser (CW) operation is possible. However, the physical mechanisms involved and the spectral structure of the supercontinuum are quite different depending on the pulse duration, the dispersion and length of the fiber etc.. The emergence of supercontinua is now relatively well understood and can be tracked with computer simulations.

The applications of supercontinuum laser sources are diverse. So they are used for example as a light source in the ( confocal ) microscopy and spectroscopy for optical coherence tomography and for the realization of frequency combs.