Passively mode-locked soliton femtosecond pulses employing graphene saturable absorber

•The graphene thin film is employed as the nanomaterial for saturable absorber (SA).•The SA fabrication process is very simple without involving heavy chemicals.•The SA has low saturation intensity that leads to low mode-locking threshold. We demonstrate a passively mode-locked fiber laser incorpora...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics and laser technology 2017-09, Vol.94, p.221-227
Main Authors: Lau, K.Y., Muhammad, F.D., Latif, A.A., Abu Bakar, M.H., Yusoff, Z., Mahdi, M.A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absorbers
Dispersion
Erbium
Femtosecond pulses
Graphene
Graphene thin film
Lasers
Mode-locking
Pulse duration
Pulse repetition rate
Pulsed fiber laser
Saturable absorber
Thin films
Transmission loss
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Summary:•The graphene thin film is employed as the nanomaterial for saturable absorber (SA).•The SA fabrication process is very simple without involving heavy chemicals.•The SA has low saturation intensity that leads to low mode-locking threshold. We demonstrate a passively mode-locked fiber laser incorporating graphene thin film (GTF) as saturable absorber (SA). The SA is fabricated by sandwiching the GTF between two single mode fiber ferrules through a fiber adaptor. The transmission loss at 1560nm and non-linear saturation absorption modulation depth for GTF-SA are 0.8dB and 2.90%, respectively. An erbium-doped fiber laser cavity is constructed to verify the functionality of GTF-SA and is designed to have net anomalous dispersion. It generates large spectral width of 4.99nm with pulse repetition rate of 9.655MHz and pulse width of 670fs. Net anomalous dispersion and time bandwidth product higher than the sech2 transform-limited pulse validate the experimental result. In short, we demonstrate high performance GTF-SA that is able to generate ultrafast pulse duration in femtosecond range effortlessly with simple and green SA fabrication procedures.
ISSN:0030-3992
1879-2545
DOI:10.1016/j.optlastec.2017.03.035