Kilowatt-level supercontinuum generation employing a homemade taper-shaped ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier.

A simple generation method of high-power supercontinuum (SC) based on a homemade long ytterbium-doped taper fiber (T-YDF) amplifier has been demonstrated experimentally and analyzed in this work. The power and spectra of the obtained SC are made adjustable by changing the seed pulse repetition rates. Under a 7.5 MHz seed pulse repetition rate, a SC output is obtained with a spectral range of 1000 nm-1650 nm, maximum output power of 1066 W, and conversion efficiency of 75.7%. The core/clad diameters of the homemade T-YDF are ∼20/400 µm and ∼30/600 µm at the input and output ends, respectively, and the total length is 25 m. Such a long taper fiber can further enhance the properties of the SC while ensuring high power and good beam quality. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of directly generating a high average power SC based on the T-YDF amplifier, which provides a proof-of-concept experiment to achieve a high average power SC source and greatly improves the potential application value of the SC source.