All-fiber CARS microscopy of live cells.

Using an all-fiber laser system consisting of a femtosecond Er/Yb fiber oscillator as the pump and an ultra-highly nonlinear fiber for Stokes generation, we demonstrate multimodal (TPF+SHG+CARS) non-linear optical microscopy of both tissue samples and live cells. Multimodal imaging was successfully performed with pixel dwell times as short as 4 micros at low laser powers (< 40 mW total).

Efficient supercontinuum generations in silica suspended core fibers.

We have experimentally studied supercontinuum generations in highly nonlinear suspended core silica fibers as alternatives to photonic crystal fibers. Octave-spanning spectrum can be easily generated at peak pump power levels as low as approximately 1.5 kW at 1 microm and approximately 1 kW at 800 nm, which effectively enables f ceo stabilization of mode-locked fiber lasers without further amplification. Experiments also confirm that the blue edge of the supercontinuum undergoes a two-phase growth process, an initial fast growth governed by phase-matched dispersive wave generation and a second slower growth governed by group-velocity-matched cross-phase modulation. We have further experimentally shown that the fundamental solitons generated from the initial fission process can be independent of pump powers and the orders which they are generated. Furthermore, while the fundamental soliton wavelength undergoes continuous red shift by Raman scattering, they continuously lose power to longer wavelength dispersive waves where phase-matching to this long wavelength dispersive wave is allowed and, otherwise, maintain its initial power where phase-matching to long wavelength dispersive wave is not allowed. We also demonstrated that total suppression of dispersive wave generation at short wavelength can be achieved in the absence of dispersion slope at the pump wavelength.

Highly nonlinear silica suspended core fibers.

Suspended-core fibers are systematically studied. We show that confinement loss in suspended-core fibers can be effectively reduced by an increase of air-cladding width for even sub-micron core diameters and, therefore, provides a considerable simpler solution than equivalent photonic crystal fibers with a large number of air holes for a wide range of nonlinear applications. We have further demonstrated a suspended-core silica fiber with core diameters of 1.27 microm and sub-dB splice loss to Hi1060. Loss at 1.55 microm was measured in this fiber to be 0.078 dB/m, a record for this small core diameter, limited mainly by scattering loss at the glass and air interface. The combination of high nonlinearity, low splice loss and low transmission loss of the suspended core silica fibers will enable a new class of low loss all-fiber nonlinear devices.