Supercontinuum Generation in Soft Glass Photonic Crystal Fibers Developed Based on 3D Printed Preforms

The readiness level of 3D glass printing technology for optical fiber development is explored. A preform of an air-glass photonic crystal fiber is printed with synthesized in-house lead borate glass using a custom-made 3D printer. The fiber is single-moded at a wavelength of 1.5 µm and has flat anomalous dispersion in the infrared range above 1.5 µm with a zero-dispersion wavelength at 1.7 µm. An octave spanning supercontinuum from 1.1 to 2.2 µm is obtained by pumping the 22 cm long section of the printed fiber in the anomalous dispersion regime with 100 fs pulses at 1560 nm wavelength using a standard off-the-shelf fiber femtosecond laser. Despite internal structural defects, the results indicate that early-stage 3D glass printing can enable the development of preforms for nonlinear fibers dedicated to supercontinuum generation with spectral widths comparable to state-of-the-art manually assembled PCFs, but still with considerably higher losses.