Titanium Disulfide Based Saturable Absorber for Generating Passively Mode-Locked and Q-Switched Ultra-Fast Fiber Lasers

In our work, passively mode-locked and Q-switched Er-doped fiber lasers (EDFLs) based on titanium disulfide (TiS2) as a saturable absorber (SA) were generated successfully. Stable mode-locked pulses centred at 1531.69 nm with the minimum pulse width of 2.36 ps were obtained. By reducing the length of the laser cavity and optimizing the cavity loss, Q-switched operation with a maximum pulse energy of 67.2 nJ and a minimum pulse duration of 2.34 mu s was also obtained. Its repetition rate monotonically increased from 13.17 kHz to 48.45 kHz with about a 35 kHz tuning range. Our experiment results fully indicate that TiS2 exhibits excellent nonlinear absorption performance and significant potential in acting as ultra-fast photonics devices.