Carbon nanofiber saturable absorbers for ultrafast pulsed laser at 1.56 μm

In this paper, we propose and experimentally validate passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber lasers utilizing CNFs as saturable absorbers (SAs). A mode-locked pulse was observed, with a central wavelength of 1562 nm and a bandwidth of 3.56 nm after inserting the CNF film into the ring cavity. The pulse duration and repetition rates are 1.28 ps and 54 MHz, respectively. The maximum output power can reach 1.93 mW. To our knowledge, this is the first report of CNF as SA in erbium-doped fiber lasers.