Abstract
Abstract Carbon nanotube (CNT) can work as excellent saturable absorber (SA) due to its advantages of fast recovery, low saturation intensity, polarization insensitivity, deep modulation depth, broad operation bandwidth, outstanding environmental stability, and affordable fabrication. Its successful application as SA has promoted the development of scientific research and practical application of mode-locked fiber lasers. Besides, mode-locked fiber laser constitutes an ideal platform for investigating soliton dynamics which exhibit profound nonlinear optical dynamics and excitation ubiquitous in many fields. Up to now, a variety of soliton dynamics have been observed. Among these researches, CNT-SA is a key component that suppresses the environmental perturbation and optimizes the laser system to reveal the true highly stochastic and non-repetitive unstable phenomena of the initial self-starting lasing process. This review is intended to provide an up-to-date introduction to the development of CNT-SA based ultrafast fiber lasers, with emphasis on recent progress in real-time buildup dynamics of solitons in CNT-SA mode-locked fiber lasers. It is anticipated that study of dynamics of solitons can not only further reveal the physical nature of solitons, but also optimize the performance of ultrafast fiber lasers and eventually expand their applications in different fields.
Highlights
Ultrafast pulses maintain significant applications in various fields, such as ultrafast imaging, optical communications, spectroscopy, biomedicine, and material processing
We have reviewed the recent progress in the dynamics of Carbon nanotube (CNT)-saturable absorber (SA) ultrafast fiber lasers, with emphasis on recent progress in real-time buildup dynamics of solitons in CNT-SA mode-locking fiber lasers
The successful application of CNT as SA has promoted the development of scientific research of ultrafast fiber lasers
Summary
Ultrafast pulses maintain significant applications in various fields, such as ultrafast imaging, optical communications, spectroscopy, biomedicine, and material processing. Various kinds of nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [8,9,10,11,12], graphene [11, 13], transition metal chalcogenide (TMD) [14], black phosphorus [15], and topological insulator [16], etc., show up semiconductor characteristics of strong third-order nonlinear effect, ultrafast response time and wide band operating wavelength range, thereby can be applied as competitive real SA. A variety of soliton dynamics have been observed in ultrafast fiber lasers, such as evolution of femtosecond soliton molecules, the internal motion of dissipative optical soliton molecules, and the dynamics of soliton explosions Among these researches, CNT-SA is a key component that suppresses the environmental perturbation and optimizes the laser system to reveal the true highly stochastic and non-repetitive unstable phenomena of the initial selfstarting lasing process. We provide in-sights into further research directions and the current challenges
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