TY - JOUR A1 - Zajnulina, Marina A1 - Boggio, Jose M. Chavez A1 - Böhm, Michael A1 - Rieznik, A. A. A1 - Fremberg, Tino A1 - Haynes, Roger A1 - Roth, Martin M. T1 - Generation of optical frequency combs via four-wave mixing processes for low- and medium-resolution astronomy T2 - Applied physics : B, Lasers and optics N2 - We investigate the generation of optical frequency combs through a cascade of four-wave mixing processes in nonlinear fibres with optimised parameters. The initial optical field consists of two continuous-wave lasers with frequency separation larger than 40 GHz (312.7 pm at 1531 nm). It propagates through three nonlinear fibres. The first fibre serves to pulse shape the initial sinusoidal-square pulse, while a strong pulse compression down to sub-100 fs takes place in the second fibre which is an amplifying erbium-doped fibre. The last stage is a low-dispersion highly nonlinear fibre where the frequency comb bandwidth is increased and the line intensity is equalised. We model this system using the generalised nonlinear Schrodinger equation and investigate it in terms of fibre lengths, fibre dispersion, laser frequency separation and input powers with the aim to minimise the frequency comb noise. With the support of the numerical results, a frequency comb is experimentally generated, first in the near infra-red and then it is frequency-doubled into the visible spectral range. Using a MUSE-type spectrograph, we evaluate the comb performance for astronomical wavelength calibration in terms of equidistancy of the comb lines and their stability. Y1 - 2015 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/38800 SN - 0946-2171 SN - 1432-0649 VL - 120 IS - 1 SP - 171 EP - 184 PB - Springer CY - New York ER -