Investigation of Saturable and Reverse Saturable Absorptions for Graphene by Z-Scan Technique

Abstract

The optical nonlinear absorption (NLA) property of multilayer graphene was investigated by Z-scan technique with picosecond laser pulse of 532-nm wavelength. Graphene samples were fabricated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with different number of layers, which were 1-, 8-, and 16-layer. The dependence of NLA coefficient $\alpha (I)$ on number of layers was investigated under the laser intensity of 7–80 GW/cm $^{\mathrm {\mathbf {2}}}$ . The results showed that $\alpha (I)$ increased as the number of layer increased, and decreased as the laser intensity increased. Nonlinearities of graphene were mainly caused by saturable absorption (SA) effect. The 1-, 8-, and 16-layer graphene exhibited SA nonlinearity. However, reversed SA (RSA) nonlinearity was observed for 16-layer graphene only. The RSA was resulted from two-photon absorption due to layer stacking-induced bandgap opening, confirmed by the $\alpha (I)$ measurement. The RSA may reduce the stability of mode-locking and therefore, it suggests that the lower layer stacking in CVD fabricated graphene is preferable to use as saturable absorbers in laser mode-locking.