Passively mode‐locked soliton fiber laser using a combination of saturable absorber and nonlinear polarization rotation technique

Abstract

AbstractAll‐fiber passively mode‐locked (ML) soliton fiber laser is demonstrated based on the combination of two ML mechanisms, single wall carbon nanotube saturable absorber, and nonlinear polarization rotation.The gain medium is a 10‐m long erbium‐doped fiber, which is pumped by a 980‐nm laser diode in a ring configuration. A stable soliton laser is succesfully achieved using the filter, which functions to reshape and maintain the soliton pulse in the cavity. It operates at 1588 nm with a repetition rate of 8.3 MHz and a pulse width of 0.79 ps. The output spectrum shows strong Kelly sidebands indicating that the pulse duration is near the minimum possible value. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:1430–1432, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26850