Mid-infrared octave-spanning supercontinuum and frequency comb generation in a suspended germanium-membrane ridge waveguide

Abstract

Stable octave-spanning supercontinuum (SC) in the mid-infrared (MIR) region finds extensive applications in spectroscopy, metrology, biochemistry, etc. The absorption of conventional silicon- or silicon oxide-dominated nonlinear media makes SC generation in MIR region technically challenging. In this paper, we propose ultrabroadband MIR-SC generation using a suspended germanium-membrane ridge waveguide. We theoretically showed that when pump pulses centered at 4.8 μm with pulse width at 180 fs and peak power at 800 W are injected into a 4-mm-long proposed ridge waveguide, the SC generated ranges from 1.96-12 μm (about 2.6 octaves), extending deep into the 'fingerprint' region. The first-order coherence is calculated to confirm the stability of the generated SC. The performance of the SC-based frequency comb is also investigated by assuming a 100-pulses pump source at a repetition rate of 100 kHz.