Parametric amplification and phase management of arbitrarily shaped PCF-supercontinuum

Flexible and stable continuum sources are one the foundations of femtosecond pulse generation. The versatility of supercontinuum formation in photonic crystal fibers (PCF) can be transfered to intense ultrashort pulse generation by parametric amplification (OPA). The main advantage of PCF based continuum sources over the classic white light generation in bulk material is their great spectrum of attributes, attainable through the modification of the spatial design parameters. This gives rise to the possibility of adapting the OPA seed pulse source to different requirements in available power level or wavelength range. This contribution shows the generation, characterization, amplification and compression of a PCF based supercontinuum source. The attainable pulse duration, obtained by this approach until now, is below 15-fs.