All-fiber,octave-spanning supercontinuum

We present an all-fiber supercontinuum source based on a passively mode-locked erbium fiber laser and a small-effective-area, germanium-doped silica fiber. The parallels between this system and the continuum generated in microstructured fibers with 800-nm pulses are discussed, and the role of dispersion is investigated experimentally. We construct a hybrid fiber by fusion splicing lengths of different-dispersion fiber together, generating more than an octave of bandwidth.