Abstract
In this paper, we propose a new, to the best of our knowledge, saturable absorber (SA) based on sodium carbonate (${{\rm Na}_2}{{\rm CO}_3}$) for producing an ultrafast mode-locked stretched pulse in a passively erbium-doped fiber laser at near-zero dispersion. The solid film of a ${{\rm Na}_2}{{\rm CO}_3}$-SA was fabricated by the drop-casting method using polyvinyl alcohol as a host polymer. The modulation depth of the proposed SA, which was measured by a balanced twin detector technique, was 2.3% with saturation intensity of ${181}\;{{\rm MW/cm}^2}$. The mode-locking operation of the EDFL-based ${{\rm Na}_2}{{\rm CO}_3}$-SA was observed at a pump power of 117 mW. A stable stretched pulse was generated by using the proposed ${{\rm Na}_2}{{\rm CO}_3}$-SA. The laser can generate pulses with a repetition rate and duration of 1.87 MHz and 820 fs, respectively, within a bandwidth of 6.6 nm. The single pulse energy reaches up to 5 nJ, which is equivalent to the average output power of 9.3 mW. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on using the ${{\rm Na}_2}{{\rm CO}_3}$-SA for generating a stretched-pulse mode-locked fiber laser.
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