Graphene Oxide vs. Reduced Graphene Oxide as saturable absorbers for Er-doped passively mode-locked fiber laser

TL;DR

This study compares graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide as saturable absorbers in Er-doped fiber lasers, finding GO to be a cost-effective and efficient option with comparable performance to rGO.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of GO and rGO as saturable absorbers, demonstrating GO's viability without reduction for fiber laser mode-locking.

Findings

Both GO and rGO enable stable mode-locking with sub-400 fs pulses.

No significant performance difference between GO and rGO as saturable absorbers.

GO offers a simpler, cost-effective fabrication process for fiber laser applications.

Abstract

In this work we demonstrate comprehensive studies on graphene oxide (GO) and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) based saturable absorbers (SA) for mode-locking of Er-doped fiber lasers. The paper describes the fabrication process of both saturable absorbers and detailed comparison of their parameters. Our results show, that there is no significant difference in the laser performance between the investigated SA. Both provided stable, mode-locked operation with sub-400 fs soliton pulses and more than 9 nm optical bandwidth at 1560 nm center wavelength. It has been shown that GO might be successfully used as an efficient SA without the need of its reduction to rGO. Taking into account simpler manufacturing technology and the possibility of mass production, GO seems to be a good candidate as a cost-effective material for saturable absorbers for Er-doped fiber lasers.