Femtosecond laser pulse generation with a fiber taper embedded in carbon nanotube/polymer composite

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a new saturable absorber based on a fiber taper embedded in a carbon nanotube/polymer composite. Greater than a 10% reduction in absorption (due to saturation) is directly measured for our saturable absorber. Using an embedded fiber-taper saturable absorber, we built an all-fiber mode-locked ring laser, which produces $594\mathrm{fs}∕1.7\mathrm{nJ}$ pulses with a repetition rate of $13.3\mathrm{MHz}$.