Abstract

Topological insulators (TIs), are novel two-dimension materials, which can act as effective saturable absorbers (SAs) in a fiber laser. Moreover, based on the evanescent wave interaction, deposition of the TI on microfiber would create an effective SA, which has combined advantages from the strong nonlinear optical response in TI material together with the sufficiently-long-range interaction length in fiber taper. By using this type of TI SA, various scalar solitons have been obtained in fiber lasers. However, a single mode fiber always exhibits birefringence, and hence can support two orthogonal degenerate modes. Here we investigate experimentally the vector characters of a TI SA fiber laser. Using the saturated absorption and the high nonlinearity of the TI SA, a rich variety of dynamic states, including polarization-locked dark pulses and their harmonic mode locked counterparts, polarization-locked noise-like pulses and their harmonic mode locked counterparts, incoherently coupled polarization domain wall pulses, including bright square pulses, bright-dark pulse pairs, dark pulses and bright square pulse-dark pulse pairs are all observed with different pump powers and polarization states.

Highlights

  • Topological insulators (TIs), are novel two-dimension materials, which can act as effective saturable absorbers (SAs) in a fiber laser

  • transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have sizeable bandgaps corresponding to only the visible and near-infrared spectrum ranges[12], while black phosphorus (BP) is very sensitive to the environment because of the high reactivity of BP with air, and this might limit their applications in real devices[13]

  • A polarization independent isolator (PI-ISO), whose polarization dependent loss was lower than 0.2 dB, was used to ensure the unidirectional operation of the ring cavity

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Summary

Results

Since this dark pulse appeared at a polarization switching position of the total laser output intensity, and separated two PDs in a period, it was identified as a dark PDWS34. By further adjusting the intra-cavity PCs, another PDWS form consisting of bright square pulse-dark pulse pairs was obtained in the total laser intensity output, as shown in Fig. 8a (Initial). The. spectra in Fig. 10d shows that the two orthogonal polarization components had the same central wavelength of 1560.04 nm, which indicates that they were PL high order HML noise-like pulses. The observation of the PL noise-like pulses can be attributed to the microfiber-based TI SA

Discussion
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