Fibre drawing is used to fabricate indefinite media based on wire array metamaterials. Fibres containing arrays of indium wires embedded in polymer are drawn using an optical fibre draw tower, a technique that is intrinsically scalable to larger‐volume fabrication. During drawing, the surface tension of the liquid indium can result in fluctuations to the wire diameter through the Plateau–Rayleigh instability. This is investigated and minimised through a modification of the draw process to achieve wire diameters as low as 1 micrometer. Such wire array fibres are assembled and characterised as electric metamaterials through the resulting high‐pass filtering behaviour. By controlling the draw ratio, the fibre drawing technique is shown to produce electric metamaterials over a wide range of frequencies, from the THz through to the edge of the mid‐IR.
A soliton mode-locked erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser has been experimentally demonstrated using copper oxide (CuO) thin film as a saturable absorber (SA). The dispersion of the EDF cavity including the CuO-SA was balanced by a suitable length of single-mode fiber (SMF). The fabricated CuO-SA has 3.5% modulation depth and 3.3 MW/cm saturation intensity. The mode-locked train pulses have 1.7 ps pulse width and 983 kHz repetition rate, while the pulse energy and output power are 1.29 nJ and 1.27 mW, respectively, at maximum pump power of 159 mW. These results indicate that the CuO thin film is a good SA candidate for a fiber laser operating at a low pump power. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a CuO-SA-based mode-locked fiber laser.
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