Graphene based widely-tunable and singly-polarized pulse generation with random fiber lasers

Abstract

Pulse generation often requires a stabilized cavity and its corresponding mode structure for initial phase-locking. Contrastingly, modeless cavity-free random lasers provide new possibilities for high quantum efficiency lasing that could potentially be widely tunable spectrally and temporally. Pulse generation in random lasers, however, has remained elusive since the discovery of modeless gain lasing. Here we report coherent pulse generation with modeless random lasers based on the unique polarization selectivity and broadband saturable absorption of monolayer graphene. Simultaneous temporal compression of cavity-free pulses are observed with such a polarization modulation, along with a broadly-tunable pulsewidth across two orders of magnitude down to 900 ps, a broadly-tunable repetition rate across three orders of magnitude up to 3 MHz, and a singly-polarized pulse train at 41 dB extinction ratio, about an order of magnitude larger than conventional pulsed fiber lasers. Moreover, our graphene-based pulse formation also demonstrates robust pulse-to-pulse stability and widewavelength operation due to the cavity-less feature. Such a graphene-based architecture not only provides a tunable pulsed random laser for fiber-optic sensing, speckle-free imaging, and laser-material processing, but also a new way for the non-random CW fiber lasers to generate widely tunable and singly-polarized pulses.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep18526
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Aston Institute of Photonics Technology (AIPT)
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Systems analytics research institute (SARI)
Additional Information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: General
Publication ISSN: 2045-2322
Last Modified: 19 Feb 2024 08:10
Date Deposited: 28 Jan 2016 13:50
Full Text Link: http://www.natu ... icles/srep18526
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2015-12-21
Accepted Date: 2015-11-17
Submitted Date: 2015-09-02
Authors: Yao, B.C.
Rao, Y.J.
Wang, Z.N.
Wu, Y.
Zhou, J.H.
Wu, H.
Fan, M.Q.
Cao, X.L.
Zhang, W.L.
Chen, Y.F.
Li, Y.R.
Churkin, D.
Turitsyn, S. (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-0101-3834)
Wong, C.W.

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