Supercontinuum generation articles from across Nature Portfolio

While a lot of research efforts have been directed towards determining the emergence mechanism of optical rogue waves, less attention has been given to characterizing the level of “rogueness" in optical systems where rogue waves manifest. The authors provide such quantitative description for rogue waves resulting from supercontinuum generation

By combining engineered dispersion and chirped quasi-phase matching in multisegment nanophotonic thin-film lithium niobate waveguides, the generation of gap-free frequency comb spanning from 330 to 2,400 nm can be realized with only 90 pJ of pulse energy at 1,550 nm.

Laser-like radiation with a very large spectral coverage is obtained with a comb-like spectrum by concatenating nonlinear processes. Such a light source is extremely useful for detecting molecular trace gases.

As a pioneer in the research on ultra-high-quality dielectric microresonators and their applications in nonlinear optics, frequency metrology and laser science, Mikhail Gorodetsky is badly missed.

Judicious scaling of the waveguide properties of a simple hollow capillary fibre filled with helium allows for powerful pulse temporal compression down to the sub-femtosecond level, further enabling the efficient generation of ultrafast ultraviolet light.

Frequency combs measure optical frequencies with an unprecedented precision, allowing myriad applications in optical metrology, high-precision spectroscopy, optical atomic clocks, attosecond science, astronomy and, recently, quantum information processing.

The finding that multimode optical fibres support a rich and complex mix of spatial and temporal nonlinear phenomena could yield a plethora of promising applications.