Soliton building from spontaneous emission by ring-cavity fiber laser using carbon nanotubes for passive mode locking

We investigate the generation of a chirped pulse in a single-mode, ring-cavity, erbium-doped fiber laser employing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as a saturable absorber (SA). The pulse propagation is simulated using analytical methods to understand and quantify the role of multiple SA properties, particularly in the propagation dynamics of the laser pulse. The soliton solution is obtained on the basis of nonlinear effects, such as gain dispersion, second anomalous group-velocity dispersion, self-phase modulation, and two-photon absorption for a generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation. The influences of the SA parameter in the range from 0.1 to 0.4 on the chirp, power, and width of the soliton are calculated. A stable, passively mode-locked fiber laser using CNTs as an SA is modeled. In addition, the power, width, chirp, and phase of the soliton pulses can be tuned by choosing suitable SA parameters. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.