Generation, characterization, and application of broadband coherent femtosecond visible pulses in dispersion micromanaged holey fibers

Submillimeter-scale dispersion micromanagement (DMM) is discussed and used to generate coherent and stable femtosecond visible pulses (bandwidth up to 50 nm and scalable center wavelength in the range of 385–625 nm) in tapered holey fibers as short as 10 mm. The longitudinal variation of the phase-matching conditions for Cherenkov radiation and four-wave mixing explains the results well. We compare the broadband noise of the visible pulses generated through a DMM holey fiber, a tapered fiber, and long holey fibers and find that DMM holey fibers offer the lowest noise for visible pulse generation. We discuss the importance of the distance scale of the DMM and show ultrabroadband visible pulse 180 nm generation by submillimeter-scale DMM, which can be compressed to a 11 fs duration. We further apply DMM to polarization-maintaining holey fibers and show different center-wavelength visible pulse generation by changing the input polarization. With DMM flexibility, a strong f-2f beat signal for carrier-envelope phase stabilization is obtained by simply mixing the visible pulse generated by a DMM holey fiber with the second harmonic of the input pulse. © 2006 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 190.7110, 060.4370.