A Home Made Supercontinuum Laser. The Ultimate White Light

[plazmatron]

A DIY Supercontinuum Laser on a budget.

This produces a continuous spectrum from 430nm all the way to 670nm!

 

[CurtisOliver]

This is impressive. I need to make time to watch this video in full to get the details.
A diy supercontinuum is a dream prospect for any hobbyist.

 

[kecked]

Wonder if you can pump the dye with diodes. I have 355nm pulsed laser doing 50 uj

 

[CurtisOliver]

Wonder if you can pump the dye with diodes. I have 355nm pulsed laser doing 50 uj

You are only 18nm away. Can’t imagine it being drastic. Only way of knowing is to get hold of the absorption spectrum of the dye.
Pulse energy seems high enough.

You have a 355nm diode or dpss?

 

[kecked]

I have an older model of this laser

355 nm laser, 1 kHz sub-ns, long life, Teem Photonics Powerchip series

355 nm laser, 350 ps, triggerable to 1kHz; Deep UV Long Life technology from Teem Photonics; Combines performance, beam quality and reliability.

www.teemphotonics.com

easy enough to try it. I bet this could be done with two prisms like in an expander for chirp correction.
really it’s exactly how you make a Ti:Saph tunable. If you select a wavelength and compress it again you’d have a tuneable visible laser with high peak power and narrow bandwidth. Interesting idea to replace rhodamine dye lasers. I wonder if you put the 355 direct into the fiber if you’d see the same spectrum but possibly shifted green to uv as the continuum. Would depend on the flurescence quench in the fiber.

how is coherence Ie phase look and divergence? Is the beam really a laser Or just a continuum source?

https://www.aatbio.com/fluorescence-excitation-emission-spectrum-graph-viewer/diphenyl_stilbene#:~:text=Spectrum%20%5BDiphenyl%20Stilbene%5D%20Diphenyl%20Stilbene%20is%20a%20fluorescent,be%20found%2C%20for%20example%2C%20in%20the%20BD%20FACSCelesta™.

looks like 355 will work. They talk about a filter but for this application I don’t see the need.

too bad you can’t qswitch a diode! Wonder if you can add a solid state gain medium to a 405nm diode to get the peak power up to excite the fiber. No where near high enough peat power on cw diodes. maybe a switched dpss….maybe. Just like to dump the dye if possible.

 

[plazmatron]

Sure, you could pump a dye Laser with a Q-Switched 355nm DPSS, I have one that will be an upcoming video. In my preliminary tests pumping dyes works, but at its fixed PRF of 1kHz you need to circulate the dye.
Whether or not the output is enough to pump the fiber is another matter.

 

[kecked]

I am hoping to avoid the dye entirely. I have a Mira I could pump with as well at 800 nm. Wonder if there is enough chi3 to give a mid IR continuum. Well easy enough to find out. Also thinking of trying my coherent dye jet dye at 575nm I get 2ps pulses at 8 MHz after cavity dumping with 150uj. I am sure that will do something. Since the pulse is so short, the chirp/pulse stretch should give a nice continuum. Thinking of this, it’s pretty ,
much the first half of a spitfire amplifiers prism temporal expander. If you pick off the wavelength you can compress again and tune the laser anywhere you like. Really that’s all the briefrigent does in a ti Saph