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Unless I'm misunderstanding (which I could well be - this isn't my field!) those use several narrow-band coloured lasers and combine the output. This article is a single wide-band semiconductor.


Actually supercontinuum lasers are not a recombination of different (incoherent) lasers but rather a 'processed' output from a single laser. You start with a high peak power laser pulse (e.g. a femtosecond mode locked oscillator) and excite a highly nonlinear process that generates new frequencies (e.g. using a special kind of optical fiber), and at the output you have a continuous broad spectrum. What happens in the fiber is actually similar to sea waves arriving on the beach - a very long and well beahaved wave steepens in the leading edge (which means new frequencies were generated) and eventually breaks/collapses into many small waves of much shorter period. 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.

A picture of the output of a fully coherent white light laser spanning from the uv to ir: http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2011/09/sub-femtosec...

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


According to the article they generate three lasers from the same silicon. I think the benefits are size and/or simplicity, cost etc.


Ah ok, thanks for clarifying.




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