SnSSe as a saturable absorber for an ultrafast laser with superior stability

Compared with SnS2 and SnSe2, SnSSe shows high hole mobilities and short relaxation time, resulting in potential applications in photoelectric devices. Here SnSSe is investigated for the ultrashort pulse generation in the mode-locked fiber laser. The prepared SnSSe saturable absorber (SA) exhibits a large modulation depth of 56.75%. Because of the saturable absorption characteristic of the SnSSe SA, mode-locked pulses as short as 158.6 fs with a signal-to-noise ratio of 94 dB are obtained at 1560.9 nm. The nonlinear exploration of SnSSe offers the possibility to explore further applications of SnSSe in near-infrared regions, especially for ultrafast photonic devices and modulators. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America