Generation of soliton mode-locked erbium-doped fibre laser with vanadium aluminum carbide thin film

Abstract

Picosecond laser pulses are showing increasing importance in various industrial and scientific applications. Here, we exploit the saturable absorption of Vanadium Aluminum Carbide (V2AlC) MAX phase to produce soliton pulses in Erbium-doped fibre laser (EDFL) cavity. The V2AlC composite thin film functions as a mode-locker in this work and it was successfully obtained by embedding the commercial MAX phase V2AlC powder into polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). The prepared V2AlC PVA film has a modulation depth of 27% and it was integrated into an EDFL cavity as a saturable absorber (SA) to generate a highly stable soliton pulse, which operates at 1560 nm wavelength. The soliton mode-locked pulse train was successfully obtained with a fixed repetition rate of 969 kHz and pulse width of 3.96 ps as the pump power is set within a range from 77 to 228 mW. At the maximum pump power of 228 mW, the average output power, pulse energy and peak power are 14.81 mW, 15.28 nJ and 3.4 kW, respectively. Overall, these results show the potential of V2AlC MAX-phase material for use in ultrafast generation. The proposed approach is straightforward and can be also applied to other fibre laser operation wavelengths.