1.06 μm Q-switched ytterbium-doped fiber laser using few-layer topological insulator Bi2Se3 as a saturable absorber

Abstract

Passive Q-switching of an ytterbium-doped fiber (YDF) laser with few-layer topological insulator (TI) is, to the best of our knowledge, experimentally demonstrated for the first time. The few-layer TI: Bi2Se3 (2-4 layer thickness) is fabricated by the liquid-phase exfoliation method, and has a low saturable optical intensity of 53 MW/cm2 measured by the Z-scan technique. The optical deposition technique is used to induce the few-layer TI in the solution onto a fiber ferrule for successfully constructing the fiber-integrated TI-based saturable absorber (SA). By inserting this SA into the YDF laser cavity, stable Q-switching operation at 1.06 μm is achieved. The Q-switched pulses have the shortest pulse duration of 1.95 μs, the maximum pulse energy of 17.9 nJ and a tunable pulse-repetition-rate from 8.3 to 29.1 kHz. Our results indicate that the TI as a SA is also available at 1 μm waveband, revealing its potential as another wavelength-independent SA (like graphene).

11 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Graphene Mode-Locked Ultrafast Laser
• Large energy mode locking of an erbium-doped fiber laser with atomic layer graphene
• Graphene Q-switched, tunable fiber laser
• Epitaxial growth of topological insulator Bi2Se3 film on Si(111) with atomically sharp interface

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Mid-infrared ultra-short mode-locked fiber laser utilizing topological insulator Bi2Te3 nano-sheets as the saturable absorber
• Bulk Saturable absorption in Topological Insulator thin Films