All-fiber erbium-doped dissipative soliton laser with multimode interference based on saturable-reserve saturable hybrid optical switch

Reverse saturable absorption is essential for the realization of dissipative solitons. In this paper, we introduce reverse saturable absorption by using nonlinear multimode interference (NL-MMI), for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, and obtain a stable dissipative soliton operation. By adjusting the coupling efficiency from multimode fiber to single mode fiber, the absorption properties of NL-MMI can be switched between saturation and reverse saturation. The dissipative soliton can be obtained with pulse width of 975 fs in the experiment, the 3-dB bandwidth at 1555 nm is 16 nm, and the maximum output power is 11.48 mW. The nonlinear absorption optical modulation and high damage threshold characteristics of the NL-MMI based ultrafast optical switch provide a new idea for realizing dissipative solitons.