Supercontinuum generation with femtosecond pulse fiber amplified VECSELs

We present a mode-locked VECSEL emitting 400-fs pulses at a 3 GHz repetition rate at 1040 nm, amplified by a cascaded ytterbium doped fiber amplifier system to an average power of 40 W. The 3-ps duration amplified pulses are recompressed to their original 400-fs duration using a high-throughput transmission grating compressor. The recompressed pulses are used to generate supercontinuum with two different photonic crystal fibers (PCFs); an all-normal dispersion PCF and a PCF with a zero-dispersion wavelength at 1040 nm, creating spectra with 20 dB bandwidths of 200 nm with 3.9 W average power and 280 nm with 2.5 W average power respectively