Bandwidth-tunable dissipative soliton and noise-like pulse in a normal dispersion fiber laser with a dual-scale saturable absorber

Abstract

A bandwidth-tunable dissipative soliton (DS) and noise-like pulse are demonstrated in an all-fiber normal dispersion fiber laser by employing a novel spectral filtering scheme. The mode locker is fabricated with a mixture composite that combines the merits of graphene and carbon nanotubes. At a pump power of 39 mW, a DS with knife edges is generated at 1565 nm. One of the steep edges is induced by gain spectral filtering and another is cut by a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG). With higher pump power, the noise-like pulse operation displays an asymmetric spectral profile, confirming the novel combined spectral filtering. When the CFBG is stretched mechanically, the bandwidth of the DS and noise-like pulse can be tuned. The bandwidth-tunable mode-locked fiber laser has numerous potential applications, such as pulse shaping, as an amplifier and in optical nonlinear investigations.