Ultrathin quartz plate-based multilayer MoS2 for passively mode-locked fiber lasers (invited)

We have grown ultrathin quartz plate-based multilayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). When employed as saturable absorber (SA), the prepared MoS2 device exhibits remarkable merits (e.g. uniform thickness, high quality of crystal lattice high damage threshold easy fabrication and good practicability). The modulation depth, saturable intensity, and non-saturable loss of this SA device are measured to be 16.1%, 0.438 MW/cm2 and 44.6% respectively. By incorporating the SA into a typical ring cavity erbium-doped fiber laser, stable passive soliton mode-locked pulse is achieved with the repetition frequency of 0.987 MHz, the signal noise ratio (SNR) of 71.4 dB and the pulse duration of 2.17 ps. The experimental results demonstrate our MoS2-SA device to be an effective mode locker, and it is promising to be used in ultrafast photonics.