Abstract
Abstract Black phosphorus (BP) attracts huge interest in photonic and optoelectronic applications ranging from passive switch for ultrafast lasers to photodetectors. However, the instability of chemically unfunctionalized BP in ambient environment due to oxygen and moisture remains a critical barrier to its potential applications. Here, the parylene-C layer was used to protect inkjet-printed BP-saturable absorbers (BP-SA), and the efficacy of this passivation layer was demonstrated on the stable and continuous operation of inkjet-printed BP-SA in harsh environmental conditions. BP-SA was integrated in an erbium-doped ring laser cavity and immersed in water at ~60°C during operation for investigation. Mode-locked pulses at ~1567.3 nm with ~538 fs pulse width remained stable for >200 h. The standard deviation of spectral width, central wavelength, and pulse width were 0.0248 nm, 0.0387 nm, and 2.3 fs, respectively, in this period, underscoring the extreme stability of BP-SA against high temperature and humidity. This approach could enable the exploitation of BP-based devices for photonic applications when operating under adverse environmental conditions.
Highlights
Ultrashort pulsed fiber lasers are an attractive light source for their flexibility, reliability, and compact integration [1], leading to a variety of applications such as industrial manufacturing, laser range finding, and materials processing
Black phosphorus (BP) attracts huge interest in photonic and optoelectronic applications ranging from passive switch for ultrafast lasers to photodetectors
BP-saturable absorbers (BP-saturable absorbers (SA)) was integrated in an erbium-doped ring laser cavity and immersed in water at ~60°C during operation for investigation
Summary
Ultrashort pulsed fiber lasers are an attractive light source for their flexibility, reliability, and compact integration [1], leading to a variety of applications such as industrial manufacturing, laser range finding, and materials processing. They can be exploited via printing techniques to allow for flexible, large-scale, high-speed, cost-effective fabrication [8] toward the commercial manufacturing of photonic devices These flexible fabrication methods combined with wideband operation and ultrafast carrier dynamics have resulted in a variety of BP-based mode-locked lasers working from near- to mid-infrared regime [9,10,11,12,13]. The prospects for the widespread practical applications of BP-based ultrashort pulsed lasers are still limited in part due to the unstable nature of BP in ambient conditions [14] This could be further exacerbated in adverse environmental conditions during operation, such as high humidity and temperature [3]. It is shown that the stability of such protected BP-SAs can be significant by demonstrating highly stable, continuous mode-locking (>200 h) for stable pulse generation under complete water immersion at 60°C
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