Effect of beam expansion loss in a carbon nanotube-doped PVA film on passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber lasers with different feedback ratios

Abstract

The effect of beam expansion induced divergent loss in a single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) doped polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) based ultrafast saturable absorber (SA) film thickness on the passive mode-locking (PML) performances of erbium-doped fiber lasers are demonstrated. The variation on the PML pulsewidth of the EDFL is discussed by changing the SWCNT-PVA SA film thicknesses, together with adjusting the pumping power and the intra-cavity feedback ratio. An almost 6 dB increment of divergent loss when enlarging the SWCNT-PVA based SA film thickness from 30–130 µm is observed. When shrinking the SA thickness to 30 µm at the largest pumping power of 52.5 mW, the optical spectrum red-shifts to 1558.8 nm with its 3 dB spectral linewidth broadening up to 2.7 nm, while the pulse has already entered the soliton regime with multi-order Kelly sidebands aside the spectral shoulder. The soliton pulsewidth is as short as 790 fs, which is much shorter than those obtained with other thicker SWCNT doped PVA polymer film based SAs; therefore, the peak power from the output of the PML-EDFL is significantly enlarged accompanied by a completely suppressed residual continuous-wave level to achieve the largest on/off extinction ratio. The main mechanism of pulse shortening with reducing thickness of SWCNT doped PVA polymer film based SA is attributed to the limited beam expansion as well as the enlarged modulation depth, which results in shortened soliton pulsewidth with a clean dc background, and broadened spectrum with enriched Kelly sidebands. The increase of total SWCNT amount in the thicker SA inevitably causes a higher linear absorption; hence, the mode-locking threshold also rises accordingly. By enlarging pumping power from 38.5–52.5 mW, the highest ascent on pulse extinction of up to 32 dB is observed among all kinds of feedback conditions. Nevertheless, the enlargement on the extinction slightly decays with increasing the feedback ratio from 30–90%, as the ascent slope gradually decays due to the more severe gain saturation effect occurring when the mode-locking gradually completes at this stage.