Efficient Optical Saturable Absorbers with Graphene on Polymer Waveguides for Femtosecond Laser Pulse Formation

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are notable for their enhanced functionalities with material flexibilities to find applications in wearable high‐speed data management systems. Due to the miniaturized dimensions of PICs, the employment of a nanomaterial having significant optical nonlinearity is...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annalen der Physik 2018-11, Vol.530 (11), p.n/a
Main Authors: Ryu, Bowon, Lee, Sungjae, Kim, Jin Tae, Song, Yong‐Won
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absorbers
Acrylic resins
Data management
Femtosecond pulses
Graphene
Integrated circuits
Lasers
Management systems
mode‐locking
Nanomaterials
Nonlinearity
Photonics
polymer waveguides
Polymers
Pulse duration
saturable absorbers
ultrafast pulses
Wave propagation
Waveguides
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are notable for their enhanced functionalities with material flexibilities to find applications in wearable high‐speed data management systems. Due to the miniaturized dimensions of PICs, the employment of a nanomaterial having significant optical nonlinearity is critical. Here, it is demonstrated that a polymer waveguide can be harmonized with nonlinear graphene to form ultrashort laser pulses. The graphene works as nonlinear saturable absorber on the polymer waveguide prepared with a perfluorinated acrylic resin. The evanescent field of a laser propagating through the waveguide interacts with graphene to induce intracavity intensity modulation for femtosecond‐scale pulse formation. The laser output is characterized quantitatively as the central wavelength, spectral width, repetition rate, extinction ratio, and pulse duration, which are 1553.32 nm, 10.21 nm, 4.18 MHz, 76.03 dB, and 874 fs, respectively. Stable operation is verified over 3 h. A graphene–polymer waveguide saturable absorber is demonstrated ensuring the nonlinear evanescent field interaction of a laser propagating through the polymer waveguide with chemical vapor deposition‐grown graphene. A passively mode‐locked fiber laser is constructed to yield an ultra‐short pulsed laser output characterized with center wavelength, repetition rate, and pulse duration of 1553.32 nm, 4.18 MHz, and 874 fs, respectively.
ISSN:0003-3804
1521-3889
DOI:10.1002/andp.201800249