SNR of a combined mode-locked fiber laser generating conventional and dissipative solitons

In this paper, we utilized a combined mode-locked fiber laser including a saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) and nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) to generate conventional solitons (CSs) and dissipative solitons (DSs), respectively, in order to investigate the difference in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between the outputs of these two types of solitons in artificial and natural saturators. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrated that, under the shared pump power, the DSs from the NPE-based mode-locked fiber output exhibited a higher SNR of approximately 60 dB, compared to the CSs from the SESAM-based mode-locked fiber output of 45 dB. Furthermore, we conducted theoretical analysis of these results. We believe that this work can provide new approaches for SNR improvement research in the fields of passively mode-locked fiber lasers.