A Simple and Efficient Method to Fabricate Graphene 2D Nanomaterial into a thin Film to Serve as a Saturable a bsorber for Fiber Laser Application

  • Authors

    • Yousif I. Hammadi
    • Tahreer S. Mansour
    https://doi.org/10.14419/ijet.v7i4.15.23011

    Received date: December 3, 2018

    Accepted date: December 3, 2018

    Published date: October 7, 2018

  • Graphene, Saturable Absorber, Thin Film
  • Abstract

    A passively pulsed fiber laser using saturable absorbers such as graphene has been increased dramatically in recent years. Up to now, researchers have been proposed many methods to fabricate graphene saturable absorber such as (evanescent coupling structure, electrochemical exfoliation, and mechanical exfoliation) for light pulse generation in a fiber laser. However, each of these methods has got some limitations which reduce the saturable absorber performance and restrict its range of applications. In this paper, we propose a simple but very efficient fabrication way of graphene saturable absorber by converting graphene Nano powder into a thin film using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a host material. The fabricated film can then be easily sandwiched between two fiber pigtails and inserted inside the laser cavity to form the saturable absorber. when compared with other methods, this method is much preferable because it provides saturable absorber with combat structure, maximum interaction area, reasonable insertion loss, polarization insensitive, controllable concentration, and safe to handle. The fabricated graphene saturable absorber in this paper was characterized and found to have a uniform distribution of the graphene nanomaterial in the PVA and have a modulation depth of 6.1% which make it a very promising saturable absorber for ultra-fast fiber laser demonstration.

  • References

    1. Alani, I., et al., Nanosecond mode-locked erbium doped fiber laser based on zinc oxide thin film saturable absorber. Indian Journal of Physics: p. 1-7.
    2. Al-Masoodi, A.H., et al., Q-switched and mode-locked ytterbium-doped fibre lasers with Sb2Te3 topological insulator saturable ab-sorber. IET Optoelectronics, 2018.
    3. Al-Masoodi, A.H., et al., Q-switched ytterbium-doped fiber laser with topological insulator-based saturable absorber. Optical Engi-neering, 2017. 56(5): p. 056103.
    4. Azooz, S., et al., Passively Q-switched fiber lasers using a multi-walled carbon nanotube polymer composite based saturable absorb-er. Optik-International Journal for Light and Electron Optics, 2015. 126(21): p. 2950-2954.
    5. Ahmed, M., et al., Q‐switched erbium doped fiber laser using sin-gle‐walled carbon nanotubes embedded in polyethylene oxide film saturable absorber. Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, 2014. 56(11): p. 2734-2737.
    6. Alani, I., et al., A few-picosecond and high-peak-power passively mode-locked erbium-doped fibre laser based on zinc oxide polyvi-nyl alcohol film saturable absorber. Laser Physics, 2018. 28(7): p. 075105.
    7. Al-Masoodi, A., et al., Cobalt oxide nanocubes thin film as satura-ble absorber for generating Q-switched fiber lasers at 1 and 1.5 µm in ring cavity configuration. Optical Fiber Technology, 2018. 45: p. 128-136.
    8. Lau, K.Y., et al., Passively mode-locked ultrashort pulse fiber laser incorporating multi-layered graphene nanoplatelets saturable ab-sorber. Journal of Physics Communications, 2018.
    9. Awang, N.A., et al. Experimental and Numerical Comparison Q-Switched Fiber Laser Generation using Graphene as Saturable Ab-sorber. in MATEC Web of Conferences. 2018. EDP Sciences.
    10. Zapata, J., et al., Efficient graphene saturable absorbers on D-shaped optical fiber for ultrashort pulse generation. Scientific re-ports, 2016. 6: p. 20644.
    11. Chen, T., H. Chen, and D. Wang, Graphene saturable absorber based on slightly tapered fiber with inner air-cavity. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2015. 33(11): p. 2332-2336.
    12. Sathiyan, S., K. Senthilnathan, and S. Sivabalan. Design of a Gra-phene based Saturable Absorber using a Side-Polished Photonic Crystal Fiber. in International Conference on Fibre Optics and Pho-tonics. 2014. Optical Society of America.
    13. Wang, J., et al., Evanescent-light deposition of graphene onto ta-pered fibers for passive Q-switch and mode-locker. IEEE Photonics Journal, 2012. 4(5): p. 1295-1305.
    14. Song, Y.-W., et al., Polarization insensitive all-fiber mode-lockers functioned by carbon nanotubes deposited onto tapered fibers. Ap-plied physics letters, 2007. 90(2): p. 021101.
    15. Lin, Y.-H., et al., Using graphene nano-particle embedded in pho-tonic crystal fiber for evanescent wave mode-locking of fiber laser. Optics express, 2013. 21(14): p. 16763-16776.
    16. Su, C.-Y., et al., High-quality thin graphene films from fast electro-chemical exfoliation. ACS nano, 2011. 5(3): p. 2332-2339.
    17. Wei, D., et al., Graphene from electrochemical exfoliation and its direct applications in enhanced energy storage devices. Chemical communications, 2012. 48(9): p. 1239-1241.
    18. Martinez, A., K. Fuse, and S. Yamashita, Mechanical exfoliation of graphene for the passive mode-locking of fiber lasers. Applied Physics Letters, 2011. 99(12): p. 121107.
    19. Martinez, A. and Z. Sun, Nanotube and graphene saturable absorb-ers for fibre lasers. Nature Photonics, 2013. 7(11): p. 842.
    20. Al-Masoodi, A., et al., Q-Switched Yb-doped fiber ring laser with a saturable absorber based on a graphene polyvinyl alcohol film. Jour-nal of Russian Laser Research, 2015. 36(4): p. 389-394.
    21. Chen, S., et al., Oxidation resistance of graphene-coated Cu and Cu/Ni alloy. ACS nano, 2011. 5(2): p. 1321-1327.
    22. Ferrari, A., et al., Raman spectrum of graphene and graphene layers. Physical review letters, 2006. 97(18): p. 187401.
  • Downloads

  • How to Cite

    I. Hammadi, Y., & S. Mansour, T. (2018). A Simple and Efficient Method to Fabricate Graphene 2D Nanomaterial into a thin Film to Serve as a Saturable a bsorber for Fiber Laser Application. International Journal of Engineering and Technology, 7(4.15), 298-300. https://doi.org/10.14419/ijet.v7i4.15.23011