Generation and dynamics of special mode-locked pulses in an ultrafast Er-doped fiber laser with SMF-GIMF-SMF saturable absorber

Abstract:

In this paper, we have demonstrated an Er-doped ultrafast laser with a single mode fiber-gradient index multimode fiber-single mode fiber (SMF-GIMF-SMF, SMS) structure as saturable absorber (SA), which can generate not only stable single-pulse state, but also special mode-locked pulses with the characteristics of high energy and noisy behaviors at proper pump power and cavity polarization state. In addition, we have deeply investigated the real-time spectral evolutions of the mode-locked pulses through the dispersive Fourier transformation (DFT) technique. It can be found that the pulse regime can actually consist of a lot of small noise pulses with randomly varying intensities. We believe that these results will further enrich the nonlinear dynamical processes in the ultrafast lasers.