Over an octave cascaded Raman scattering in short highly germanium-doped silica fiber

In this paper, we report on cascaded Raman scattering (RS) in a highly germanium-doped silica fiber (HGDF) pumped by a picosecond pulsed master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) system at 1064 nm in the normal dispersion regime. Benefited by the higher Raman gain of germanium (GeO2) than silica in the core, the length of the HGDF is only several meters. The broadest output spectrum comprises of 10 orders Raman stokes waves and eventually evolves into a supercontinuum (SC) spanning from 1000 to beyond 2100 nm with an output average power up to Watt scale. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to obtain such a broad cascaded RS spectrum in a short length of GeO2-doped step index silica fiber. We also numerically investigate the propagation of picosecond pulses in this HGDF based on the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation (GNLSE) which includes most of the dispersive and nonlinear effects, and the simulation results are in fairly good agreement with our experiments. It is believed that the numerical approach adopted in this paper is very beneficial for designing customized cascaded Raman fiber lasers before experimental implementations.