Harmonically mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser based on a Sb₂Te₃topological insulator saturable absorber

Abstract

In this letter we present for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a harmonically mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser with antimony telluride (Sb2Te3) topological insulator material used as a saturable absorber (SA). The SA was prepared via mechanical exfoliation of the bulk material. The 80 nm thick Sb2Te3 layers transferred onto fiber ferrule entirely cover the fiber core. The Er-doped fiber mode-locked laser based on such SA generated optical pulses was centered at 1558 nm with 1.9 ps duration and a fundamental repetition rate of 3.75 MHz. Increasing the pump power results in stable harmonic mode-locked operation up to the 81st harmonic at 304 MHz repetition frequency. The laser was capable of generating optical solitons with 2.2 ps duration. The number of generated harmonics could be tuned only by changing the pump power injected into the laser cavity.

Dissipative soliton resonances in all-fiber Er-Yb double clad figure-8 laser

“…All-fiber, femtosecond, passively mode-locked lasers have attracted much attention over the last two decades [1][2][3]. Unfortunately, they tend to have relatively low average output powers and pulse energies, mostly due to limited gain, offered by standard single-mode active fibers [4].…”

Harmonic Mode-Locked Fiber Laser based on Photonic Crystal Fiber Filled with Topological Insulator Solution

“…However, mode-locked fiber lasers based on NPR and the NALM technique are intrinsically environmentally unstable. Therefore, researchers have strong motivations investigate HML in passively mode-locked fiber lasers by real saturable absorbers (SAs) [11][12][13][14][15][16], such as semiconductor saturable absorbers (SESAM), single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) and graphene. However, these SAs also possess some inherent drawbacks.…”

Near‐Infrared Saturable Absorption of Defective Bulk‐Structured WTe2 for Femtosecond Laser Mode‐Locking

“…This phenomenon is known to occur in a medium with laser-active ions in which strong optical intensity can excite the ions to the upper energy level at a suffi ciently high rate so that they completely fi ll the upper energy states, leading to the saturation of the absorption. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] In particular, very recently, saturable absorption performance has also been observed in TMDCs such as MoS 2 , MoSe 2 , MoTe 2 , WS 2 , WSe 2 , and WTe 2 , in which mono-and/or few-layer structures of TMDCs were tacitly prepared for use as SAs. [ 12 ] Although most of commercial saturable absorbers have so far been made of III-V semiconductors, other materials including carbon nanotubes, graphene, black phosphorus, gold nanoparticles, topological insulators, etc., have recently been investigated as novel saturable absorption materials.…”