Abstract
Active manipulation of light in optical fibres has been extensively studied with great interest because of its compatibility with diverse fibre-optic systems. While graphene exhibits a strong electro-optic effect originating from its gapless Dirac-fermionic band structure, electric control of all-fibre graphene devices remains still highly challenging. Here we report electrically manipulable in-line graphene devices by integrating graphene-based field effect transistors on a side-polished fibre. Ion liquid used in the present work critically acts both as an efficient gating medium with wide electrochemical windows and transparent over-cladding facilitating light–matter interaction. Combined study of unique features in gate-variable electrical transport and optical transition at monolayer and randomly stacked multilayer graphene reveals that the device exhibits significant optical transmission change (>90%) with high efficiency-loss figure of merit. This subsequently modifies nonlinear saturable absorption characteristics of the device, enabling electrically tunable fibre laser at various operational regimes. The proposed device will open promising way for actively controlled optoelectronic and nonlinear photonic devices in all-fibre platform with greatly enhanced graphene–light interaction.
Highlights
Active manipulation of light in optical fibres has been extensively studied with great interest because of its compatibility with diverse fibre-optic systems
All-fibre photonic devices that indirectly interact with graphene by evanescent-field coupling are expected to potentially exhibit enhanced graphene–light interaction, a high optical damage threshold, and low insertion loss with fibre-optic communications and fibre laser systems, but previous researches on the topic are restricted to passive devices with limited performance[4,8,16]
An optical fibre buried into the quartz block was side-polished and two metal electrodes were subsequently deposited on the quartz block, serving as source and drain
Summary
Active manipulation of light in optical fibres has been extensively studied with great interest because of its compatibility with diverse fibre-optic systems. Combined study of unique features in gate-variable electrical transport and optical transition at monolayer and randomly stacked multilayer graphene reveals that the device exhibits significant optical transmission change (490%) with high efficiency-loss figure of merit. This subsequently modifies nonlinear saturable absorption characteristics of the device, enabling electrically tunable fibre laser at various operational regimes. All-fibre photonic devices that indirectly interact with graphene by evanescent-field coupling are expected to potentially exhibit enhanced graphene–light interaction, a high optical damage threshold, and low insertion loss with fibre-optic communications and fibre laser systems, but previous researches on the topic are restricted to passive devices with limited performance[4,8,16]. The device was successfully integrated into a fibre laser system as an electrically tunable in-line nonlinear SA, where the laser operation can be tuned from continuous wave, through Q-switched to passively mode-locked regime with electrical signals
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