Co3O4 film saturable absorber for generating soliton mode-locked pulses in erbium-doped fiber laser

Abstract

Herein, a soliton mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser is proposed for the 1.5-μm region using Co3O4 as a saturable absorber (SA). Spherical Co3O4 nanoparticles (NPs) were embedded in polyvinyl alcohol to form a Co3O4- polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film. Highly stable soliton mode-locked pulses based on the Co3O4-PVA film output were observed at 1558.86 nm with a 3 dB bandwidth, fundamental frequency, pulse width, and signal-to-noise ratio of 2.25 nm, 5.68 MHz, 1.24 ps, and 72.37 dB, respectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that the spherical Co3O4 NPs exhibited good performance in creating soliton mode-locked fiber lasers as a promising SA.