Graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide as saturable absorbers onto D-shaped fibers for sub 200-fs EDFL mode-locking

We present high mode-locking performances from an erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) by using graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide (r-GO) as saturable absorbers (SA) deposited onto the polished surface of a D-shaped optical fiber. The samples were prepared with different concentrations and its characterization was performed by using an optical microscope, a Raman spectrometer, nonlinear saturable absorption measurements, polarization setup, and laser mode-locking analysis. As a 1550-nm polarizer, the best GO (r-GO) samples exhibited higher polarization extinction ratio (PER) of 7.94 (7.65) dB, corresponding to 84 (83) %, both showing similar graphene TE absorption behavior. In a managed-intracavity dispersion laser, broadest bandwidths of 27.2 and 24.1 nm and the corresponding shortest pulse duration of 190 fs could be generated when incorporating the SA with high modulation depth (above 20%), being so far the best mode-locking results ever reported in the literature for GO and r-GO SA onto D-shaped optical fibers in EDFL. (c) 2017 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement