Graphene-based Saturable Absorber for Pulsed Fiber Laser Generation

Recently, graphene has been considered as great candidate to be applied as the saturable absorber (SA) with its brilliant optical characteristics such as ultrafast recovery time and ultra-wideband absorption due to its zero bandgap energy and linear dispersion of Dirac electrons. This paper focuses on reviewing the generation of short pulses from passive mode-locked fiber lasers that employ graphene-based saturable absorber (GBSA). Various parameters that make it excellent for generation ultra-short pulsed including modulation depth, nonlinearity, saturation intensity, self-amplitude modulation, its crystal lattice structure, band gap energy distribution are discuss in details. Furthermore, comparison between single layers and multilayer GBSA is made to explain the effect of layers number on the behaviour of SA in ring cavity fiber lasers.