Actively manipulation of operation states in passively pulsed fiber lasers by using graphene saturable absorber on microfiber

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate an operation switchable Erbium-doped fiber laser by employing graphene saturable absorber (GSA) on microfiber. With the introducing of a polydimethylsiloxane layer, a graphene can be considered as a parallel plate on microfiber and induces different propagation losses to TE and TM modes. By the use of such polarization sensitive GSA on microfiber, Erbium doped fiber laser with switchable operation states such as continuous wave, stable Q-switching, Q-switched mode-locking, and continuous-wave mode-locking, can be achieved by simply tuning the polarization states in the laser cavity. Our results show that covering graphene on microfibers could be a promising method for fabricating all fiber SA, and may have high potential in wide applications.

Graphene-coated tilted fiber-Bragg grating for enhanced sensing in low-refractive-index region

“…Already, micro-fibers and side-polished fibers have been integrated with graphene to achieve improved all-optical modulations, sensors, etc. [14][15][16][17].In this Letter, we integrate graphene layers onto a TFBG to tailor its spectrum and demonstrate a new architecture to strongly enhance fiber sensing in the low-refractive-index region (<1.413). With the interaction between graphene coating and the cladding modes of TFBG, we observe significant changes of the coupling intensity of the cladding modes in TFBG spectrum.…”

“…Already, micro-fibers and side-polished fibers have been integrated with graphene to achieve improved all-optical modulations, sensors, etc. [14][15][16][17].…”

1550-nm fluorescence efficiency and heat generation of erbium-doped fiber pumped by pulsed and quasi-continuous-wave lasers

“…However, the switching between continues wave and Q-switched pulse has been demonstrated by using grapheme saturable absorber on microfiber [10]. Therefore, the switching between continuous wave (NMLL) and pulse (MLL) can be realized on a tiny laser system for aerospace navigation in the further.…”

Flexible graphene saturable absorber on two-layer structure for tunable mode-locked soliton fiber laser

“…According to previous reports, both the intraband and interband conductivity are plural forms for TE and TM modes in graphene, and the imaginary portion of which will directly affect the attenuation of two polarization modes [28]. When the chemical potential of graphene is lower, the negative imaginary part of interband conductivity plays a leading role, which results in the improvement of the transmission of TE mode [27][28][29][30]. Since the CVD graphene sandwich the microfiber close in this SSA, sensitive polarization dependence of saturable absorption can be got.…”

“…The polarization-dependent saturable absorption as shown in Fig. 3 is measured by a home-made mode-locked laser with 1.5 ps pulse at 1.55 µm [27]. We found that the transmission (T TE ) of TE mode of sample A is almost 20.7 times higher than that (T TM ) of the TM mode in the nonsaturable range, which is much larger than sample B (T TE /T TM = 1.9) and C (T TE /T TM = 4.4).…”