Broadband supercontinuum generation in all-normal dispersion chalcogenide microwires

We report the first chalcogenide microwire designed with all-normal dispersion to generate supercontinuum by optical wave breaking, a low-noise nonlinear process. The chalcogenide (As2S3) microwire is coated with PMMA and tapered to a diameter of 0.58 μm to achieve the all-normal dispersion regime. The generated supercontinuum spectrum spans over an octave from 960 to >2500  nm using a microwire length of only 3 mm and a low pulse energy of 150 pJ.