Passively harmonic mode locked erbium doped fiber soliton laser with carbon nanotubes based saturable absorber

Chengbo Mou,Sergei Turitsyn,Aleksey Rozhin,Raz Arif

doi:10.1364/ome.2.000884

Abstract

We have proposed and demonstrated passive harmonic mode locking of an erbium doped fiber laser with soliton pulse shaping using carbon nanotubes polyvinyl alcohol film. Two types of samples prepared by using filtration and centrifugation were studied. The demonstrated fiber laser can support 10th harmonic order corresponding to 245 MHz repetition rate with an output power of ~12 mW. More importantly, all stable harmonic orders show timing jitter below 10 ps. The output pulses energies are between 25 to 56 pJ. Both samples result in the same central wavelength of output optical spectrum with similar pulse duration of ~1 ps for all harmonic orders. By using the same laser configuration, centrifugated sample exhibits slightly lower pulse chirp.

Highlights

Short pulse mode locked fiber lasers are useful light sources with advantages including good beam quality, alignment free, efficient heat dissipation and simple configuration [1]
Based on the different preparation procedure of the carbon nanotubes (CNT) polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) samples, we have evaluated the performance of filtrated and centrifugated CNT PVA film in an erbium doped fiber laser (EDFL) for passively harmonic mode locking (HML)
One fiber pigtailed isolator (OIS) is employed to ensure single direction oscillation of the laser, the laser is forwarded pumped through a grating stabilized 980 nm laser diode (LD) using a 980 nm/1550 nm wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) with a maximum output power of 500 mW

Summary

Introduction

Short pulse mode locked fiber lasers are useful light sources with advantages including good beam quality, alignment free, efficient heat dissipation and simple configuration [1]. This type of laser with comparable performance to the conventional bulky counterparts has many applications such as material processing, telecommunication, nonlinear science and biomedical research. Fiber lasers operate at repetition rate of the order of tens of megahertz due to the relatively long laser cavity (normally in meters scale). For some applications it is desirable to have high repletion rate fiber lasers for instance, in the fields of telecommunication, spectroscopy and metrology.

Methods

Results

Conclusion