The
technological revolution of two-dimensional (2D) materials
provides vitality for ultrafast optics. Compared with other 2D materials,
indium sulfide (In2S3) has become an attractive
candidate material in the field of nonlinear optics because of its
high carrier mobility, ultrafast photoelectric sensitivity, medium
band gap, and high absorption coefficient. However, its nonlinear
optical effects have rarely been studied. In this work, we synthesized
2D β-In2S3 nanoplates using the hydrothermal
method. The saturable absorber based on β-In2S3 nanoplates has been investigated. The experimental results
demonstrated that the modulation depth and saturable intensity of
β-In2S3 are measured as 2.32% and 18.4
MW·cm–2, respectively, which indicates that
β-In2S3 has great potential in ultrafast
optics among emerging nonlinear optical materials. Using such unprecedented
properties, the mode-locked fiber laser with 247th (1.92 GHz) harmonic
mode locking is realized in the C-band for the first time to our knowledge.
This paves the way for exploring β-In2S3 as an outstanding nonlinear material for high-performance ultrafast
optics.
Manganese dioxide (MnO2) is considered to be one of the nanomaterials with enormous value in research and application because of its high theoretical specific capacitance, large specific surface area and porosity, excellent electron transfer ability, and excellent light absorption ability. However, exploring superior nonlinear absorption of MnO2 in the broadband spectrum is still the key challenge to harvesting their greatest potential. In this paper, the optical modulator based on MnO2 is fabricated, and its nonlinear optical performance is measured. The results indicate that the modulation depth is 4.4% and the saturable intensity is 32.8 MW cm−2 at 1.5 µm region. What's more fascinating is that the modulator based on MnO2 is integrated into Er‐doped and Tm‐doped fiber resonators to successfully demonstrate its broadband mode‐locking operations. The coexistence of harmonic bound state pulse and conventional soliton pulse, as well as dual‐wavelength solitons, have been obtained in a communication window and conventional soliton in a 2 µm‐band can be also achieved. This demonstrates that MnO2 serves as a broadband optical modulator, which makes MnO2 more competitive in the future ultrafast photonics and helps to expand the frontier of photonic technology.
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