All-fiber dissipative soliton laser with 10.2 nJ pulse energy using an evanescent field interaction with graphene saturable absorber

Abstract

We demonstrate a high-power dissipative soliton fiber laser by employing an evanescent field-coupled graphene saturable absorber (SA). In the SA, a polymer supporter enhances the nonlinear interaction between the guided mode and the high-quality graphene layers, which enables high-power operation of the mode-locked laser in the normal dispersion regime of the laser cavity. A self-started dissipative soliton fiber laser stably generates pulses with a spectral bandwidth of 10.4 nm at 1565 nm. The linearly chirped pulse of the laser output has a pulse duration of 13.8 ps at a repetition rate of 16.99 MHz. The maximum output power achieved is 174 mW using a single-mode pump laser diode with an applied power of 785 mW. The pulse energy is estimated to be 10.2 nJ; we believe this is the highest pulse energy ever reported for an Er-doped dissipative soliton fiber laser oscillator using a graphene SA.