Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.

Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.

We demonstrate a highly stable mode locked fiber laser based on single wall carbon nanotubes. The mode locking is achieved by the evanescent field interaction of the propagating light with a single wall carbon nanotube saturable absorber in a microfiber. The pulse width is 66 fs, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the shortest pulse achieved in a carbon nanotube mode locked fiber laser. The maximum average output power is 26 mW, which is about 20 times larger than that of a typical carbon nanotube mode locked fiber laser. The center of the wavelength is 1555 nm, with 54 nm spectral width. The repetition rate is 146 MHz. To investigate the laser’s stability, the output pulses are monitored for 120 h and there is no significant degradation of the laser spectral width or shape.

Conventional soliton (CS) and noise-like pulse (NLP) are two different kinds of pulse regimes in ultrafast fiber lasers, which have many intense applications. In this article, we experimentally demonstrate that the pulse regime of an Er-doped fiber laser could be converted between conventional soliton and noise-like pulse by using fast response saturable absorbers (SA) made from different layers of single-wall carbon nanotubes (CNT). For the monolayer (ML) single-wall CNT-SA, CS with pulse duration of 439 fs at 1560 nm is achieved while for the bilayer (BL) single-wall CNT, NLP at 1560 nm with a 1.75 ps spike and a 98 ps pedestal is obtained. The transition mechanism from CS to NLP is investigated by analyzing the optical characteristics of ML and BL single-wall CNT. The further theoretical simulation illustrates that CNT-SA enables the switching between CS and NLP in anomalous dispersion regime in Er-doped fiber lasers.