Ultrafast photonics application of graphdiyne in the optical communication region

Abstract

As a kind of novel allotrope of carbon, graphdiyne (GDY) has attracted wide interest of scientists from different fields. Due to excellent electrical and optical properties, it has important and promising prospects in the fields of energy, catalysis and optoelectronics, etc. However, investigations of this emerging material on nonlinear optics and ultrafast photonics are rarely involved. In our work, we have fabricated a saturable absorber (SA) based on graphdiyne and applied it to an erbium-doped fiber laser at the 1.5 μm region. Based on the evanescent field interaction, we obtain the mode-locked laser pulse at a center wavelength of 1564.70 nm which has a repetition rate of 12.05 MHz and a pulse width of 734 fs. This is the first time that graphdiyne has been used as a SA to obtain a mode-locked fiber laser in femtosecond level, which proves the great prospect of graphdiyne on fiber lasers and opens up a path for its application in ultrafast photonics and optoelectronics.