科研之友
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摘要
Triturated charcoal nano-powder directly brushed on a fiber connector end-face is used for the first time as a fast saturable absorber for a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber-ring laser (EDFL). These dispersant-free charcoal nano-powders with a small amount of crystalline graphene phase and highly disordered carbon structure exhibit a broadened x-ray diffraction peak and their Raman spectrum shows the existence of a carbon related D-band at 1350 cm(-1) and the disappearance of the 2D-band peak at 2700 cm(-1). The charcoal nano-powder exhibits a featureless linear absorbance in the infrared region with its linear transmittance of 0.66 nonlinearly saturated at 0.73 to give a Delta T/T of 10%. Picosecond mode-locking at a transform-limited condition of a low-gain EDFL is obtained by using the charcoal nano-powder. By using a commercial EDFA with a linear gain of only 17 dB at the saturated output power of 17.5 dB m required to initiate the saturable absorption of the charcoal nano-powder, the EDFL provides a pulsewidth narrowing from 3.3 to 1.36 ps associated with its spectral linewidth broadening from 0.8 to 1.83 nm on increasing the feedback ratio from 30 to 90%. This investigation indicates that all the carbon-based materials containing a crystalline graphene phase can be employed to passively mode-lock the EDFL, however, the disordered carbon structure inevitably induces a small modulation depth and a large mode-locking threshold, thus limiting the pulsewidth shortening. Nevertheless, the nanoscale charcoal passively mode-locked EDFL still shows the potential to generate picosecond pulses under a relatively low cavity gain. An appropriate cavity design can be used to compensate this defect-induced pulsewidth limitation and obtain a short pulsewidth.
- 出版日期2013-5
