Nanographene-based saturable absorbers for ultrafast fiber lasers

Abstract

The generation of femtosecond pulse laser in the erbium-doped fiber laser system is presented by integrating of the nanographene-based saturable absorbers (SAs). A simplified method of dispersed nanographene-based SAs side-polished fiber device with controllable polished length and depth was also developed. The dependence of geometry of a graphene-deposited side-polished fiber device on optical nonlinear characteristics and on the performance of the MLFL was screened. We found that the 10 mm polished length with 1.68 dB insertion loss had the highest modulation depth (MD) of 1.2%. A stable MLFL with graphene-based SAs employing the optimized side-polished fiber device showed a pulse width, a 3 dB bandwidth, a time-bandwidth product (TBP), a repetition rate, and pulse energy of 523 fs, 5.4 nm, 0.347, 16.7 MHz, and 0.18 nJ, respectively, at fundamental soliton-like operation. The femtosecond pulse laser is achieved by evanescent field coupling through graphene-deposited side-polished fiber devices in the laser cavity. This study demonstrates that the polished depth is the key fabrication geometric parameter affecting the overall optical performance and better results exist within the certain polished range. © 2014 Hsin-Hui Kuo and Shuo-Fu Hong.