| Citation: | WANG Kai, WANG Yi-fan, ZHANG Lu-nian, YAN Yu-hang, DAI Li-long, HUANG Qian-qian, MOU Cheng-bo. Highly stable all-polarization-maintaining few-cycle femtosecond fiber laser mode-locked by single-walled carbon nanotubes[J]. Chinese Optics. doi: 10.37188/CO.2026-0089
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To meet the stringent requirements of attosecond science, precision manufacturing, and ultrafast spectroscopy for high-performance ultrashort pulses, this study reports the development of a highly stable, self-starting all-polarization-maintaining few-cycle femtosecond fiber laser. A 100.45 MHz all-polarization-maintaining erbium-doped fiber seed source is constructed using a single-walled carbon nanotube film as a saturable absorber. By employing an all-polarization-maintaining bidirectional amplification scheme combined with nonlinear spectral broadening and dispersion management, the system achieves a pulse duration of 30.1 femtoseconds after nonlinear broadening in a polarization-maintaining highly nonlinear fiber and subsequent dispersion compensation. This corresponds to a few-cycle pulse train containing approximately 5.8 optical cycles, with an amplified average output power exceeding 200 milliwatts. Stability measurements demonstrate that the seed source maintains a power root-mean-square fluctuation of only 0.4 percent over 10 hours of continuous operation. Furthermore, after the implementation of temperature control and piezo-electric transducer stabilization for repetition rate locking, the Allan deviation reaches 9.98 × 10−14 over 100 seconds. With its compact architecture and exceptional operational stability, this seed source establishes a robust experimental foundation for the subsequent generation of octave-spanning supercontinuum and high-performance frequency comb applications.
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