A Mode-Locked Soliton Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser with a Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Poly-Ethylene Oxide Film Saturable Absorber

We present a simple, compact and low-cost mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) embedded in a poly-ethylene oxide (PEO) thin film as a passive saturable absorber. The film is fabricated by using a prepared homogeneous SWCNT solution, which is mixed with a diluted PEO solution and cast onto a glass Petri dish to form, by evaporation, a thin film. The 50 μm-thick film is sandwiched between two fiber connectors to construct a saturable absorber, which is then integrated in an EDFL cavity to generate self-started stable soliton pulses operating at 1560.8 nm. The soliton pulse starts to lase at a pump power threshold of 12.3 mW with a repetition rate of 11.21 MHz, a pulse width of 1.02 ps, an average output power of 0.65 mW and a pulse energy of 57.98 pJ.