Influence of reverse saturable absorption effect on conventional and dissipative solitons fiber lasers

Abstract We numerically investigate the influence of the reverse saturable absorption effect of real saturable absorbers on conventional and dissipative solitons. The results show that the reverse saturable absorption effect leads to more loss and clamps peak power of both conventional and dissipative solitons, but plays different roles on their properties. When the cavity operates at conventional solitons state, the reverse saturable absorption effect restricts the maximum pulse energy to less than 0.1 nJ, facilitates the formation of multiple solitons, but maintains the time-bandwidth product close to 0.315, indicating the pulses maintain the sech2 shape. While the cavity operates at dissipative solitons state, the reverse saturable absorption effect increases the maximum pulse energy from 11 to 13 nJ and plays a key role in transforming the pulse states, which further facilitates the generation of dissipative soliton resonance pulses. In addition, the reason of the different influences on pulses in two mode-locked regimes is also discussed. Our results reveal the role and promote the rational use of the reverse saturable absorption effect in different mode-locked regimes.