Atomic‐Layer Graphene as a Saturable Absorber for Ultrafast Pulsed Lasers

By Q. Bao, Han Zhang, Yu Wang, Zhenhua Ni, Yongli Yan, Z. Shen, K. Loh, D. Tang. 2009

2,471 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The optical conductance of monolayer graphene is defined solely by the fine structure constant, α = $e^2 /\hbar c$ (where e is the electron charge, $\hbar $ is Dirac's constant and c is the speed of light). The absorbance has been predicted to be independent of frequency. In principle, the interband optical absorption in zero‐gap graphene could be saturated readily under strong excitation due to Pauli blocking. Here, use of atomic layer graphene as saturable absorber in a mode‐locked fiber laser for the generation of ultrashort soliton pulses (756 fs) at the telecommunication band is demonstrated. The modulation depth can be tuned in a wide range from 66.5% to 6.2% by varying the graphene thickness. These results suggest that ultrathin graphene films are potentially useful as optical elements in fiber lasers. Graphene as a laser mode locker can have many merits such as lower saturation intensity, ultrafast recovery time, tunable modulation depth, and wideband tunability.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41f6bd8e154334ccb3b093616dbe9b58e122a420

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Excitons in atomically thin 2D semiconductors and their applications (2017, background): “Based on third-order nonlinear processes, saturable absorbers [66, 67], wavelength converters [68], and polarization controllers [69] have been demonstrated with high performance.”
Graphene Photonics, Plasmonics, and Optoelectronics (2014, neutral): “to produce picosecond laser pulses [89]–[92].”