Octave-spanning ultraflat supercontinuum with soft-glass photonic crystal fibers.

We theoretically identify some photonic-crystal-fiber structures, made up of soft glass, that generate ultrawide (over an octave) and very smooth supercontinuum spectra when illuminated with femtosecond pulsed light. The design of the fiber geometry in order to reach a nearly ultraflattened normal dispersion behavior is crucial to accomplish the above goal. Our numerical simulations reveal that these supercontinuum sources show high stability and no significant changes are detected even for fairly large variations of the incident pulse.