Passively mode-locked soliton femtosecond pulses employing graphene saturable absorber

We demonstrate a passively mode-locked fiber laser incorporating graphene thin film (GTF) as saturable absorber (SA). The SA is fabricated by sandwiching the GTF between two single mode fiber ferrules through a fiber adaptor. The transmission loss at 1560 nm and non-linear saturation absorption modulation depth for GTF-SA are 0.8 dB and 2.90%, respectively. An erbium-doped fiber laser cavity is constructed to verify the functionality of GTF-SA and is designed to have net anomalous dispersion. It generates large spectral width of 4.99 nm with pulse repetition rate of 9.655 MHz and pulse width of 670 fs. Net anomalous dispersion and time bandwidth product higher than the sech2 transform-limited pulse validate the experimental result. In short, we demonstrate high performance GTF-SA that is able to generate ultrafast pulse duration in femtosecond range effortlessly with simple and green SA fabrication procedures.