Broadband Saturable Absorption of Graphene Oxide Thin Film and Its Application in Pulsed Fiber Lasers

Abstract

Graphene oxide (GO) has been used for optical intensity manipulation and short pulse shaping. Most interestingly, it can be used as a broadband light absorber. Such property has been systematically investigated in this paper, in a broad wavelength range from 1 to 2-μm. We fabricated one type of GO/polyvinyl alcohol (GO/PVA) film and use it as a saturable absorber (SA) in Er-, Yb-, and Tm-doped fiber ring lasers, respectively, to build pulsed fiber lasers. It is demonstrated that broad range of mode-locking in the 1-μm and 1.5-μm regions can be obtained. In addition, Q-switching around wavelength of 1870 nm can be obtained in a Tm-doped fiber ring lasers. To the best our knowledge, this is the broadest wavelength regime in which one type of GO SA film can be used to build all-fiber pulsed ring lasers.