Widely-tunable, passively Q-switched erbium-doped fiber laser with few-layer MoS2 saturable absorber Yizhong Huang,1 Zhengqian Luo,1,∗ Yingyue Li,1 Min Zhong,1 Bin Xu,1 Kaijun Che,1 Huiying Xu,1 Zhiping Cai,1 Jian Peng,2 and Jian Weng2,3 1 Department 2 Department
of Electronic Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China of Biomaterials, College of Materials, Xiamen University, 361005, China 3
[email protected] ∗
[email protected]
Abstract: We propose and demonstrate a MoS2 -based passively Qswitched Er-doped fiber laser with a wide tuning range of 1519.6-1567.7 nm. The few-layer MoS2 nano-platelets are prepared by the liquid-phase exfoliation method, and are then made into polymer-composite film to construct the fiber-compatible MoS2 saturable absorber (SA). It is measured at 1560 nm wavelength, that such MoS2 SA has the modulation depth of ∼2% and the saturable optical intensity of ∼10 MW/cm2 . By further inserting the filmy MoS2 -SA into an Er-doped fiber laser, stable Q-switching operation with a 48.1 nm continuous tuning from S- to C-waveband is successfully achieved. The shortest pulse duration and the maximum pulse energy are 3.3 μ s and 160 nJ, respectively. The repetition rate and the pulse duration under different operation conditions have been also characterized. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first demonstration of MoS2 Q-switched, widely-tunable fiber laser. © 2014 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.3510) Lasers, fiber; (160.4236) Nanomaterials; (140.3540) Lasers, Qswitched.
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#220774 - $15.00 USD Received 11 Aug 2014; revised 24 Sep 2014; accepted 25 Sep 2014; published 8 Oct 2014 (C) 2014 OSA 20 October 2014 | Vol. 22, No. 21 | DOI:10.1364/OE.22.025258 | OPTICS EXPRESS 25258
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1.
Introduction
Passively Q-switched fiber lasers (PQFLs) [1] have been widely applied in material processing, range findings, telecommunications and medicine. In particular, wide wavelength tunability is a key feature of PQFL, and is highly desirable in some specific applications such as WDM technology, spectroscopy and biomedical research. The key element for obtaining widely-tunable PQFL is a broadband saturable absorber (SA). At present, semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) [2] are thought as one of the most mature and commercial SAs, but SESAMs are expensive for fabrication and have narrow operation bandwidth (typically few-tens nm [3]), which possibly limits the broadband tunable Q-switching operation. Therefore, the low-cost, broadband and high-performance SAs are in high demand. In the past decade, the considerable attention has been given to nanomaterial-based SAs such as single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) [4-7], graphene [8-18] and topological insulators (TIs) [19-25], mainly due to their advantages such as broadband operation, easy-fabrication and low-cost. However, SWNTs usually require the broad tube-diameter distribution for obtaining the broadband operation, leading to high additional loss. Graphene is an intrinsic ultra-broadband SA, but its modulation depth is often low (typically
