Ultra-fast fibre laser systems based on SESAM technology: new horizons and applications

Carbon nanotubes for ultrafast fibre lasers

“…Most commonly used material SAs are the III-V group binary and ternary semiconductors in the form of multiple quantum wells (MQW), grown on a distributed Bragg reflector [23,27,28]. These are so-called semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs).…”

“…To reduce the recovery time down to a few picoseconds, MQW structures should maintain a significant amount of carrier trapping defects. Methods, allowing this to be achieved, are low-temperature molecular beam epitaxy growth of the MQW or, alternatively, utilising post growth ion implantation [5,28]. By the start of the 1990s and until now, the SESAMs were used for mode locking of solidstate lasers in a broad spectral range between 800 nm and ~2 μm to generate sub-100 fs pulses [5,28].…”

A stable, wideband tunable, near transform-limited, graphene-mode-locked, ultrafast laser

“…Ultrafast passively mode-locked fiber lasers with spectral tuning capability have widespread applications in biomedical research, spectroscopy, and telecommunications [1][2][3], due to their simplicity, compactness and efficient heat dissipation [2][3][4][5][6]. Currently, the dominant technology is based on semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) [2][3][4].…”

“…Currently, the dominant technology is based on semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) [2][3][4]. However, these have a narrow tuning range, and require complex fabrication and packaging [2,7].…”

Hybrid Mode Locked Fiber Ring Laser

“…Recently, compact passively mode-locked fiber lasers have been successfully constructed to generate subpicosecond pulses by using a saturable absorber (SA) such as semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SSAM) [12], graphene [13], nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) technique [14,15] and nonlinear fiber loop mirror [16]. Despite the fact that those passively mode locked lasers can produce ultrashort pulses, the passive mode-locking scheme suffers from the drawback of low repetition rate, which is generally at MHz-level.…”