Current Optics and Photonics

Optical Society of Korea (한국광학회)
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Femtosecond Mid-IR Cr:ZnS Laser with Transmitting Graphene-ZnSe Saturable Absorber

  • Won Bae Cho (Digital Biomedical Research Division, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) ;
  • Ji Eun Bae (Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Seong Cheol Lee (Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Nosoung Myoung (Advanced Photonics Research Institute, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Fabian Rotermund (Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
  • Received : 2023.07.28
  • Accepted : 2023.09.21
  • Published : 2023.12.25
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Abstract

Graphene-based saturable absorbers (SAs) are widely used as laser mode-lockers at various laser oscillators. In particular, transmission-type graphene-SAs with ultrabroad spectral coverage are typically manufactured on transparent substrates with low nonlinearity to minimize the effects on the oscillators. Here, we developed two types of transmitting graphene SAs based on CaF2 and ZnSe. Using the graphene-SA based on CaF2, a passively mode-locked mid-infrared Cr:ZnS laser delivers relatively long 540 fs pulses with a maximum output power of up to 760 mW. In the negative net cavity dispersion regime, the pulse width was not reduced further by inhomogeneous group delay dispersion (GDD) compensation. In the same laser cavity, we replaced only the graphene-SA based on CaF2 with the SA based on ZnSe. Due to the additional self-phase modulation effect induced by the ZnSe substrate with high nonlinearity, the stably mode-locked Cr:ZnS laser produced Fourier transform-limited ~130 fs near 2,340 nm. In the stable single-pulse operation regime, average output powers up to 635 mW at 234 MHz repetition rates were achieved. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to achieve shorter pulse widths from a polycrystalline Cr:ZnS laser by utilizing the graphene deposited on the substrate with high nonlinearity.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning, Korea (RS-2023-00208484); the Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No.2021-0-00019, Research on Optical Learning Technology for AI).

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