Ultrafast fiber laser delivering conservative, dispersion-managed, and dissipative solitons

A thulium-doped fiber laser, delivering the temporal solitons, has been proposed with a carbon nanotubes saturable absorber. By adjusting the dispersion design in the laser cavity, the proposed laser can generate three types of solitons, which are conservative soliton (CS), dispersion-managed soliton (DMS), and dissipative soliton (DS), respectively. The experimental results show that, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the autocorrelation traces of CS, DMS, and DS are in good agreement with hyperbolic secant curve, Gaussian curve, and super-Gaussian curve, respectively. DS with the broad spectral bandwidth of 45.3 nm is emitted from the cavity while the dispersion is adjusted to 0.005 ps2.