supercontinuum

Actually supercontinuum lasers are not a recombination of different (incoherent) lasers but rather a 'processed' output from a single laser.

For more cool physics related to this read about frequency combs, which are (most of the time) frequency stabilized supercontinuum lasers.

Sentisivity issued: Chirping Pulsed Supercontinuum Sources (which are actually used for OCT) is challenging.

Coherence: Supercontinuum Sources have issues with coherence stability, which degrades the imaging range.

Price: Pulsed Supercontinuum Sources suitable for chirping and OCT applications are quite expensive.

What are the advantages of this versus just chirping a pulsed supercontinuum source?

What about Optical rogue waves, Supercontinuum generation (color, wave division multiplexing, ); and/or Superradiance (as nonlinear optical effects for a neuromorphic computation platform)?

There is an interesting analogy between the nonlinear wave propagation effects believed to be responsible for ocean rogue waves and those responsible for optical effects like supercontinuum generation.

> What are the advantages of this versus just > chirping a pulsed supercontinuum source?

The laser in this article is probably 100x or even more cheaper than a setup like this, but also does not have the full coherence supercontinuum sources have, so it will be used for different things.

This has been a a field of research that has been primarily been developed in Optics, in fact, my PhD research included creating ultrafast (femtosecond), supercontinuum (white light) vortices that are capable of transmitting information over 2^L channels where L is the amount of twist the light has.

: > Several detrimental effects limit the use of ultrafast lasers in multi-photon processing and the direct manufacture of integrated photonics devices, not least, dispersion, aberrations, depth dependence, undesirable ablation at a surface, limited depth of writing, nonlinear optical effects such as supercontinuum generation and filamentation due to Kerr self-focusing.

(If they measured the speed of the off-to-on transition, I missed it skimming the paper.) And the actual light they're making the 6.5fs pulse out of is a "supercontinuum laser beam that spans over 400–1000 nm".

Supercontinuum lasers are actually white, in that they are a broad range of frequencies of light.