Abstract

Passively mode-locked fiber soliton lasers are attractive sources of short optical pulses for laboratory and telecommunications applications because of their properties of simplicity, tunability, and sub-picosecond pulse generation. Recently, a new design of fiber laser was proposed, which combines the ease of self starting of saturable absorber mode-locked lasers with the soliton-shaping properties and intensity discrimination of a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM).¹ In this paper we report the generation of sub-picosecond soliton pulses from this laser at a stable repetition rate of over 2 GHz where the combined action of a multiple quantum well (MQW) saturable absorber and a NALM form a hybrid saturable absorber, which is able to suppress the spectral sidebands observed in soliton lasers by up to 20 dB and give clean picosecond soliton pulses at the output.

© 1996 Optical Society of America