Graphene is a useful saturable absorber in a variety of lasers working in mode-locking or Q-switch regimes. The optical performance of chemically synthesized graphene is still not completely characterized. In this study, the saturable absorption and the nonlinear refractive index of graphene flakes in N-methylpyrrolidone, in both liquid and solid phases, have been studied at 800 nm with the z-scan technique using femtosecond laser pulses. The results obtained using a Ti:sapphire laser oscillator in the mode-locking regime (6 fs, 78 MHz) or in the continuous wave shows that the optical properties of graphene have a thermal origin, while at the lower repetition rate and higher energy and intensity of a Ti:sapphire amplifier (95 fs, 1 kHz), it shows the electronic Kerr effect. Solid samples with very high optical densities, equivalent to 60 layers of graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), can be fabricated. They show a higher saturation intensity (Is≈100 GW cm–2) than CVD-grown (74 MW cm–2) or epitaxially grown (4 GW cm–2) graphene and intensity-dependent changes in transmission from 25% to 43%. This change in transmission in multilayer solid samples points to a good performance as a saturable absorber in laser cavities.
The diffusion process of electrons and holes which have been pumped into a metastable band in bismuth films by a 1.064-fim laser pulse is considered in the calculation of the induced thermal gradient. The fit between the temporal evolution of this calculated thermal gradient and that of the thermoelectric response of films to the laser excitation allows us to estimate an upper limit of the ambipolar diffusion coefficient of metastable carriers.
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