Dispersion-managed Ho-doped fiber laser mode-locked with a graphene saturable absorber

In this Letter, we demonstrate an all-fiber holmium-doped laser operating in the stretched-pulse regime. As a result of dispersion management, the laser is capable of generating 190 fs pulses with a bandwidth of 53.6 nm. The pulses centered at 2060 nm reach 2.55 nJ of energy. Mode-locking is achieved with a multilayer graphene saturable absorber (SA). The Letter also presents the measurement of group velocity dispersion of active (Nufern SM-HDF-10/130), passive (SMF28), and dispersion-compensating (Nufern UHNA4) fibers in a 1.8 -2.1 mu m range. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on an all-fiber, stretched-pulse laser operating beyond 2 mu m with nanomaterial-based SA. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America