Q‐switched erbium doped fiber laser using single‐walled carbon nanotubes embedded in polyethylene oxide film saturable absorber

Abstract

We demonstrate simple, compact, and low cost passively Q‐switched erbium doped fiber lasers (EDFLs) using a single‐walled carbon nanotubes based saturable absorber (SA), which is prepared using polyethylene oxide as host polymer. The EDFL starts to generate a stable Q‐switching pulse at pump power of 30.8 mW operating at wavelength of 1533.7 nm. The repetition rate of the Q‐switching pulse can be tuned from 8.0 to 29.4 kHz by increasing the pump power from 30.8 to 69.5 mW while the pulse width drops from 24.2 to 11.2 µs. At the maximum pump power of 69.5 mW, the EDFL produces the maximum pulse energy of 93.9 nJ. Besides showing good Q‐switching performance, the SA is easy to fabricate and cheap. This makes the proposed EDFL suitable for applications in metrology, environmental sensing, and biomedical diagnostics. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:2734–2737, 2014

Comparison of Polyethylene Oxide and Polyvinyl Alcohol as a Host for Graphene Saturable Absorber at 1.5 µm Region

“…Although the calculated pulse energy of graphene-PEO is higher, other important parameters particularly the repetition rate, pulse width and maximum peak power are dominated by graphene-PVA. Most importantly, we have confirmed the ability of graphene-PVA based SA to withstand higher pump power, which is significant and agrees with previous reported work [5,10,[23][24][25].…”

“…In addition, good binding material will assist in fine controllability of saturable absorption. In view of binding material used in SA fabrication, few polymeric materials have been applied which include polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) [5][6][7][8][9] and polyethylene oxide (PEO) [10][11][12]. Note that, graphene derivatives with PVA-binded SA have been demonstrated in our previous work, particularly at 1.5 µm [13][14] and 2.0 µm [15].…”

Femtosecond mode‐locked erbium‐doped fibre laser with Alq 3 saturable absorber

“…It offers some potential advantages over active mode‐locking technique including compactness, flexibility, simplicity and low cost [5]. Up to date, many materials have been used as SA to develop mode‐locked laser, such as semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs), graphene and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) [6–8]. Although SESAMs have been widely utilised, they suffer from complex fabrication process and have rather a narrow operation bandwidth (typically a few tens of nanometres) [9].…”

A Simple and Efficient Method to Fabricate Graphene 2D Nanomaterial into a thin Film to Serve as a Saturable a bsorber for Fiber Laser Application

“…Last two decades, the interest on demonstration of a passively pulsed fiber laser is increasing dramatically due to its highly fa-vorable advantages over the active techniques [1][2][3][4][5]. The key ele-ment to generate passively light pulses is saturable absorber (SA) [6,7] Therefore, this research increment on passively pulsed fiber laser has consequently raised the attention of the researcher on proposing simple and elective methods to fabricate the satura-ble absorbers.…”