Abstract
We investigate the timing phase noise of fiber lasers mode locked by graphene oxide (GO) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), respectively, integrated in a linear cavity fiber laser in the reflecting operation. Due to the shorter decay time of the GO and CNTs, weaker slow saturable absorber effects are expected and mode-locked lasers based on these two saturable absorbers exhibit low excess timing phase noise coupled from the laser intensity noise. Compared with a reference laser mode locked by semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), GO based laser obtains a timing phase noise reduction of 7 dB at 1 kHz and a timing jitter reduction of 45% experimentally whereas CNTs based laser obtains a timing phase noise reduction of 3 dB and a timing jitter reduction of 29%. This finding suggests that saturable absorbers with short decay time have the potential for achieving mode locking operation with low timing phase noise, which is important for applications including frequency metrology, high-precision optical sampling, clock distribution and optical sensing.
Highlights
Novel materials have emerged in recent years as versatile saturable absorbers (SAs) for modelocked lasers
From the view of timing phase noise of the mode-locked lasers, we investigate the noise properties of the fiber lasers operating at 1.5 μm mode locked by graphene oxide (GO) and single wall Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and compare them with a reference laser mode locked by semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM)
It is found that due to the smaller saturable absorber decay time and weaker excess phase noise conversion induced by the slow saturable absorber effect, both the GO laser and the CNT laser exhibit better timing phase noise and timing jitter compared with the SESAM laser
Summary
Novel materials have emerged in recent years as versatile saturable absorbers (SAs) for modelocked lasers. Topological insulators have been proved as a new type of SA Their 2-dimensional (2D) structures show much similarities with graphene and experimental results have been reported in the lasers incorporating their nonlinear properties [33,34,35], flexible material utilization [36,37,38], narrow-pulse-width operations [39, 40], high-repetition-rate mode locking [41] and Qswitched operation [42]. There is another well-known SA, semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), which exhibits excellent engineering flexibility for different SA parameters and has been proved as a significant success in mode locking operations [44,45,46,47] For applications such as frequency metrology, optical sampling, clock distribution and optical sensing, laser timing phase noise and timing jitter are key parameters to achieve high precision [48]. This result indicates that SAs with smaller decay time have the potential to achieve mode locking with low timing phase noise
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