The aim of this project is to obtain new all-fiber light sources based on the photonic crystal fiber (PCF) technology. We will focus on fiber lasers operating on continuous wave, Q-switched or mode-locked regime, and their combination with highly non-linear PCF for supercontinuum generation in all-fiber systems.

The project includes the fabrication of rare-earth-doped PCF, nonlinear PCF and other special fibers as dual-core, photosensitive and polarizing PCF. We will take advantage of different postprocessing techniques, as tapering and Bragg gratings photo-inscription, to realize the PCF components that the project requires. Acousto-optic in-fiber interaction and nonlinear coupling in dual-core PCF will be exploited as all-fiber modulators. The tapering of PCF will permit a precise engineering of the group velocity dispersion, the enhancement of the acousto-optic interaction, a fine control of the coupling in dual-core PCF and the mode adaptation between dissimilar fibers.

In addition to analyze real PCF, taking into account the details of the geometry by means of an electronic microscope image, we will develop automatic designing tools to obtain PCF with specific properties. We will address the vector propagation of optical pulses in PCF and PCF tapers by solving properly the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation, in order to study the polarization dynamics of supercontinuum generation and the design of taper transitions to attain adiabatic soliton compression to the few-optical-cycle regime. Finally, we will tackle the task of describing the evolution of the mutual coherence function of short pulsed light in nonlinear regime after propagation inside PCF.

Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación