Reliable high-efficiency supercontinuum generation with multiple thin plates

Supercontinuum(SC)has a wide range of applications in the field of ultrafast optics. Based on the self-phase modulation effect, this paper demonstrates a high intensity, wide band and stable SC generation with multiple dielectric plates. The SC pulses were generated by the 0.5 mJ, 40 fs Ti: Sapphire laser pulses at 5 kHz applied to 12 thin plates of hybrid fused silica and sapphire. These thin plates were placed in a vacuum chamber with low-pressure helium, which can solve the questions of the damage of the thin plates surface and filamentation in air. This study obtained a continuum covering 500 to 950 nm with the transmission of 88%, and the conversion efficiency was as high as 15% at 600 nm and 6% at 550 nm relative to the wavelength of peak intensity. The results show that the SC generated by this scheme has the advantages of high intensity and good stability, which has potential application value in the fields of nonlinear optics and strong field physics.