The supercontinuum (SC) generation in all-normal dispersion (ANDi) photonic-crystal fiber (PCF) pumped by high power picosecond pulses are investigated in this paper. Our results show that an octave SC may be achieved by pumping the ANDi PCF with picosecond pump pulses. However, the PCF length required may have to be lengthened to several tens of centimeters, which is much longer than that with femtosecond pump pulses. The relatively long PCF gives rise to much higher Raman gain and stronger Raman frequency shift compared to those with femtosecond pump pulses, which in turn not only cause a distorted temporal waveform and an un-flattened spectrum, but also severely degrade the coherence of the generated SC.
In this paper, the influences of the dispersion distribution in the cavity on the output pulse properties of the all-normaldispersion(ANDi) fiber laser are investigated. Our simulations show that, as the relative length of the dispersion fiber increases, the temporal width and the spectral bandwidth of the output pulse for an ANDi fiber laser with fixed total cavity dispersion or fiber length are decreased, while the pulse energy is enhanced and the compressed pulse width is increased.These simulation predictions have been proved by our experimental results. The reason may be that the nonlinear phase shift accumulated in the nonlinear fiber is more than that in the dispersion fiber if they have the same length.
