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 50μm-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 12.3mW 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.