Random fiber laser directly generates visible to near-infrared supercontinuum

Supercontinuum (SC) generation directly from a random fiber laser (RFL) structure is limited in spectrum span and output power so far. Investigations on wavelength range improvement of SC generated in RFL are analyzed and discussed. The experimental results show that cascaded four wave mixing (FWM) and passive modulation of pump light can explain the appearance of visible components and pulse performance in time domain respectively. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time a SC covering visible and near-infrared range with 20-dB bandwidth of more than 660 nm is generated directly from a RFL with average output power of 3.4 W, and the spectrum spanning from 600 nm to 1700nm. This work proves that a RFL can be a novel visible to near-infrared SC generation method which has a great potential in various applications.