Supercontinuum Generation in Fibers Infiltrated with Liquid Crystals

Supercontinuum generation in a capillary tube infiltrated with a nematic liquid crystal is investigated theoretically in the near infrared region. A liquid crystal with a high electronic nonlinearity is chosen, which makes it possible to generate 100 nm wide supercontinua using IO ps pulses with peak power 1.5 kW in a 10 cm long waveguide. The possibility of tuning the spectrum of the generated Supercontinuum by changing the dispersion of the waveguide is also considered. It is found that the broadening of the spectrum in both the normal and anomalous regime is mainly due to self phase modulation, and therefore the dispersion of the waveguide is only of minor importance. The tuning of the dispersion is achieved by varying the temperature of the liquid crystal inside the capillary