Coherent supercontinuum generation in soft glass photonic crystal fibers

We demonstrate experimentally for what is to our knowledge the first time that air-silica microstructure optical fibers can exhibit anomalous dispersion at visible wavelengths. We exploit this feature to generate an optical continuum 550 THz in width, extending from the violet to the infrared, by propagating pulses of 100-fs duration and kilowatt peak powers through a microstructure fiber near the zero-dispersion wavelength.