Low timing jitter and intensity noise from a soliton Er-fiber laser mode-locked by a fiber taper carbon nanotube saturable absorber

We characterize the timing jitter and intensity noise of an 80-MHz soliton Er-fiber laser mode-locked by a fiber taper carbon nanotube saturable absorber (ft-CNT-SA) up to the Nyquist frequency. The measured rms timing jitter is 3.0 fs (11.0 fs) integrated from 10 kHz (1 kHz) to 40 MHz offset frequency. The measured rms relative intensity noise (RIN) is 0.069% (0.021%) integrated from 10 Hz to 40 MHz (1 MHz) offset frequency. We identify that the resulting timing jitter is dominated by the Gordon-Haus jitter originated from the negative dispersion necessary for soliton mode-locking with a slow saturable absorber. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America