Fiber Optic Parametric Oscillators Using 6-Core Microstructure Fibers

Fiber-based optical parametric oscillators are useful coherent light sources due to their broad wavelength tunability, high gain, and high conversion efficiency. When using a fiber containing multiple cores as part of the oscillator, the core separation distance can be tailored for desired performance characteristics due to the distance dependence of the nonlinear phase shift. We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, 6-core microstructure fiber-based optical parametric oscillators using fibers with core separation distances of 8 m and 10 m. We observe cascaded four wave mixing in the optical spectrum and investigate the power dependence of the pump to signal/idler conversion efficiency, spectral bandwidth, and gain. We compare the performance for microstructure fibers with differing core separation distances. Designing novel coherent light sources is of primary interest for parametric amplification, entangled photon pair generation for biophotonics, heralded spectroscopy, and quantum optics.