Mid-Infrared Supercontinuum Generation using Dispersion-Varying Silicon-Rich Silicon Nitride Waveguide

A promising supercontinuum (SC) source made of dispersion varying 2-mm silicon-rich silicon nitride tapered waveguide is numerically proposed for highly coherent broad-band SC generation from 825 nm to 5660 nm employing pump at 1.55 $\mu$m with a pulse width of 50-fs duration. Simulation result shows that the SC bandwidth obtained at the waveguide output cross the material transparency limit with a very low peak power of 25 W. Our proposed design exhibits a significant potentiality in the mid-infrared SC generation in terms of spectral flatness and long wavelength expansion compared to the traditional planar waveguide design. Such a highly coherent SC source can be used in the field of optical coherent tomography, biomedical imaging and variety of industrial optical sensing applications.