Nanosecond-pulsed erbium-doped fiber lasers with graphene saturable absorber

We demonstrate graphene mode-locked nanosecond erbium-doped fiber laser in an all-fiber ring cavity. The clean and robust pulse train was generated at 27 mW pump power. Resultant central wavelength, repetition rate and pulse width was 1560 nm, 388 kHz and 6 ns, respectively. With two stage fiber amplifier, the output power was 553 mW, corresponding to single pulse energy of 1.4 mu J. In addition, the pulse-width can be varied ranging from 3 ns to 20 ns at repetition rate between 200 kHz and 1.54 MHz by changing the length of the laser cavity. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.