Towards low timing phase noise operation in fiber lasers mode locked by graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes at 1.5 μm

We investigate the timing phase noise of fiber lasers mode locked by graphene oxide (GO) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), respectively, integrated in a linear cavity fiber laser in the reflecting operation. Due to the shorter decay time of the GO and CNTs, weaker slow saturable absorber effects are expected and mode-locked lasers based on these two saturable absorbers exhibit low excess timing phase noise coupled from the laser intensity noise. Compared with a reference laser mode locked by semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), GO based laser obtains a timing phase noise reduction of 7 dB at 1 kHz and a timing jitter reduction of 45% experimentally whereas CNTs based laser obtains a timing phase noise reduction of 3 dB and a timing jitter reduction of 29%. This finding suggests that saturable absorbers with short decay time have the potential for achieving mode locking operation with low timing phase noise, which is important for applications including frequency metrology, high-precision optical sampling, clock distribution and optical sensing. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America