Cladding-filled graphene in a photonic crystal fiber as a saturable absorber and its first application for ultrafast all-fiber laser

We demonstrate a saturable absorber (SA) based on cladding-filled graphene in a specially designed and manufactured photonic crystal fiber (PCF) for the first time. The saturation absorption property is achieved through the evanescent coupling between the guided light and the cladding-filled graphene layers. To boost the mutual interaction, the PCF is designed to contain five large air holes in the cladding and small-core region. Employing this graphene-PCF SA device, we construct an erbium-doped all-fiber laser oscillator and achieve mode-locked operation. This device can pave the way for high power and all-fiber applications of photonics with graphene with some unique advantages, such as single-mode operation, nonlinearity enhancement, high-power tolerance, environmental robustness, all-fiber configuration, and easy fabrication. (C) 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)