title: Double-Wall Carbon Nanotube Hybrid Mode-Locker in Tm-doped Fibre Laser: A Novel Mechanism for Robust Bound-State Solitons Generation.
abstract: The complex nonlinear dynamics of mode-locked fibre lasers, including a broad variety of dissipative structures and self-organization effects, have drawn significant research interest. Around the 2 μm band, conventional saturable absorbers (SAs) possess small modulation depth and slow relaxation time and, therefore, are incapable of ensuring complex inter-pulse dynamics and bound-state soliton generation. We present observation of multi-soliton complex generation in mode-locked thulium (Tm)-doped fibre laser, using double-wall carbon nanotubes (DWNT-SA) and nonlinear polarisation evolution (NPE). The rigid structure of DWNTs ensures high modulation depth (64%), fast relaxation (1.25 ps) and high thermal damage threshold. This enables formation of 560-fs soliton pulses; two-soliton bound-state with 560 fs pulse duration and 1.37 ps separation; and singlet+doublet soliton structures with 1.8 ps duration and 6 ps separation. Numerical simulations based on the vectorial nonlinear Schr¨odinger equation demonstrate a transition from single-pulse to two-soliton bound-states generation. The results imply that DWNTs are an excellent SA for the formation of steady single- and multi-soliton structures around 2 μm region, which could not be supported by single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). The combination of the potential bandwidth resource around 2 μm with the soliton molecule concept for encoding two bits of data per clock period opens exciting opportunities for data-carrying capacity enhancement.
authors.affiliation: Nanoscience Research Group and Aston Institute of Photonics Technologies Aston University, Aston triangle Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK.
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chernysheva
authors.affiliation: Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia.|Institute of Computational Technologies SB RAS, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia.
authors.forename: Anastasia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bednyakova
authors.affiliation: Nanoscience Research Group and Aston Institute of Photonics Technologies Aston University, Aston triangle Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK.|Al Musanna College of Technology, Muladdah, Al Musanna, Sultanate of Oman.
authors.forename: Mohammed
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Al Araimi
authors.affiliation: Cambridge Graphene Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0FA, UK.
authors.forename: Richard C T
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Howe
authors.affiliation: Cambridge Graphene Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0FA, UK.
authors.forename: Guohua
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.affiliation: Cambridge Graphene Centre, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0FA, UK.
authors.forename: Tawfique
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Hasan
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie-CNR and Dipartimento di Fisica-Politecnico di Milano, Milano 20133, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gambetta
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie-CNR and Dipartimento di Fisica-Politecnico di Milano, Milano 20133, Italy.
authors.forename: Gianluca
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Galzerano
authors.affiliation: Soochow Institute for Energy and Materials InnovationS, College of Physics, Optoelectronics and Energy &Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China.|Key Laboratory of Advanced Carbon Materials and Wearable Energy Technologies of Jiangsu Province, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, China.|IFW Dresden, P.O. Box 270116, 01069 Dresden, Germany.|Centre of Polymer and Carbon Materials, Polish Academy of Sciences, M. Curie-Sklodowskiej 34, Zabrze 41-819, Poland.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rümmeli
authors.affiliation: Nanoscience Research Group and Aston Institute of Photonics Technologies Aston University, Aston triangle Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK.
authors.forename: Aleksey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Rozhin