This paper presents a tunable optofluidic waveguide dye laser utilizing two centrifugal Dean flows. The centrifugal Dean flow increases the light confinement of the dye laser by shaping a three-dimensional (3D) liquid waveguide from curved microchannels. The active medium with the laser dye is dissolved in the liquid core and pumped with an external pump laser to produce stimulated emission. The laser's Fabry-Pérot microcavity is formed with a pair of aligned gold-coated fiber facets to amplify the fluorescent emission. The advantage of the 3D optofluidic waveguide dye laser is its higher efficiency, thus to obtain lasing at a reduced threshold (60%) with higher output energy. The demonstrated slope efficiency is at least 3-fold higher than its traditional two-dimensional equivalent. In addition, the laser output energy can be varied on demand by tuning the flow rates of the two flows. This technique provides a versatile platform for high potential applications microfluidic biosensor and bioanalysis.

We have demonstrated an all-normal-dispersion passively mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser using a graphene oxide/polyvinyl alcohol (GO-PVA) saturable absorber without surfactant, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. The experimental results show that the pulse duration of the mode-locked lasers varies from 191 ps to 1.68 ns, while the cavity round trip time changes from 24 to 458 ns, through the variation of the cavity length. In addition, the proposed passively mode-locked fiber laser demonstrates a maximum average output power of 539 mW with a laser cavity length of 94 m, and the corresponding single pulse energy reaches 0.429 µJ. The proposed mode-locked fiber lasers with large chirp pulses may find potential applications in fiber chirped pulse amplification systems for micromachining, material processing and diagnostic applications.

In this paper we present an extensive theoretical and numerical analysis of monolithic high-index contrast grating, facilitating simple manufacture of compact mirrors for very broad spectrum of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) emitting from ultraviolet to mid-infrared. We provide the theoretical background explaining the phenomenon of high reflectance in monolithic subwavelength gratings. In addition, by using a three-dimensional, fully vectorial optical model, verified by comparison with the experiment, we investigate the optimal parameters of high-index contrast grating enabling more than 99.99% reflectance in the diversity of photonic materials and in the broad range of wavelengths.

Single-mode operation is a desirable but elusive property for lasers operating at high pump powers. Typically, single-mode lasing is attainable close to threshold, but increasing the pump power gives rise to multiple lasing peaks due to inter-modal gain competition. We propose a laser with the opposite behavior: multimode lasing occurs at low output powers, but pumping beyond a certain value produces a single lasing mode, with all other candidate modes experiencing negative effective gain. This phenomenon arises in a lattice of coupled optical resonators with non-fine-tuned asymmetric couplings, and is caused by an interaction between nonlinear gain saturation and the non-Hermitian skin effect. The single-mode lasing is observed in both frequency domain and time domain simulations. It is robust against on-site disorder, and scales up to large lattice sizes. This finding might be useful for implementing high-power laser arrays.

Graphene/III-V semiconductor van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures offer potential access to physics, functionalities, and superior performance of optoelectronic devices. Nevertheless, the lack of a bandgap in graphene severely restricts the controllability of carrier properties and therefore impedes its applications. Here, we demonstrate the engineering of graphene bandgap in the graphene/GaAs heterostructure via C and Ga exchange induced by the method of femtosecond laser irradiation (FLI). The coupling of the bandgap-opened graphene with GaAs significantly enhances both the harvest of photons and the transfer of photongenerated carriers across the interface of vdW heterostructures. Thus, as a demonstration example, it allows us to develop a saturable absorber combining a delicately engineered graphene/GaAs vdW heterostructure with InAs quantum dots capped with short-period superlattices. This device exhibits significantly improved nonlinear characteristics including <1/3 saturation intensity and modulation depth 20 times greater than previously reported semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors. This work not only opens the route for the future development of even higher performance mode-locked lasers, but the significantly enhanced nonlinear characteristics due to doping-induced bandgap opening of graphene by FLI in the vdW heterostructures will also inspire wide applications in photonic and optoelectronic devices.