Supercontinuum generation by intermodal four-wave mixing in a step-index few-mode fibre

Abstract

We demonstrate broadband supercontinuum generation from 560 nm up to 2350 nm by coupling a simple Q-switched picosecond laser at 1064 nm into a normally dispersive step-index few-mode optical fiber designed to support five modes. It is further shown that multiple cascaded intermodal four-wave mixing and Raman processes occur in the fiber leading to the generation of new frequency components with far detuning up to 165 THz. The multimode properties of this fiber yield a number of intermodal nonlinear coupling terms, and we compare the generated parametric sideband wavelengths from the experiment with calculations from phase-matching conditions for intermodal four-wave mixing.