70-fs mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with topological insulator

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 6; no. 1; p. 19997
• Main Authors: Liu, Wenjun, Pang, Lihui, Han, Hainian, Tian, Wenlong, Chen, Hao, Lei, Ming, Yan, Peiguang, Wei, Zhiyi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 27-01-2016; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 140/125; 639/624/1020/1086; 639/624/1020/1090; 639/624/1020/1095; Chemical vapor deposition; Erbium; Humanities and Social Sciences; Lasers; multidisciplinary; Optics; Polarization; Science; Spectroscopy
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep19997

Femtosecond optical pulses have applications in optical communication, astronomical frequency combs and laser spectroscopy. Here, a hybrid mode-locked erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser with topological insulator (TI) is proposed, for the first time to our best knowledge. The pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method is employed to fabricate the fiber-taper TI saturable absorber (TISA). By virtue of the fiber-taper TISA, the hybrid EDF laser is passively mode-locked using the nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) and emits 70 fs pulses at 1542 nm, whose 3 dB spectral width is 63 nm with a repetition rate and transfer efficiency of 95.4 MHz and 14.12%, respectively. Our experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid mode-locked EDF lasers have better performance to achieve shorter pulses with higher power and lower mode-locking threshold in the future.