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Carbon nanotube (CNT)–polymer composite films are key elements in widespread photonic and optoelectronic applications. One particular successful application is to produce ultrashort optical pulses in the laser cavity. Nevertheless, such composite film may suffer from severe humidity/water degradation, from which the laser may even stop generating regular pulses. Here, surfactant-free CNT–styrene methyl-methacrylate polymer composite film is fabricated. Based on such film-type saturable absorber, a self-starting passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with the capability of generating ≈1 ps pulses is demonstrated. From the perspective of experimental measurements and numerical simulations, the effectiveness of a saturable absorber in generating ultrashort pulses is confirmed. The operating composite film can survive under fully immersed water condition for 30 days. More importantly, after the non-operating composite film has been fully soaked in the water tank for 2 days, it can still mode-lock the laser as it is in dry air condition, confirming the humidity resistance capability. In addition, it is experimentally found that the mechanical packaging of the composite film has an impact on the survival time of composite film under water immersion.

We demonstrate a multi-wavelength mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser by incorporating a pair of polarization maintaining 45° tilted fiber gratings (PM-45°TFG) based Lyot filter. Thanks to the functions of the polarizer and the comb filtering introduced by the Lyot filter, dissipative soliton (DS) pulses centered at 1035.26 nm, 1044.93 nm, 1055.62 nm, 1066.11 nm and 1076.63 nm can be generated respectively by finely tuning the intracavity polarization controllers (PCs). Moreover, the laser also can operate in a multi-wavelength regime via appropriately adjusting the pump power and polarization orientation. The high nonlinearity induced by the long cavity length leads to the generation of h-shaped mode-locked pulse with a repetition rate of 566.27 kHz. In the absence of any disturbance, the laser can operate steadily, that can potentially be used in various fields including wavelength division multiplexing systems etc.

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