Study on the mechanically exfoliated graphene saturable absorption dependence on the number of layers and its influence on passive mode-locking erbium-doped fiber laser dynamics

We experimentally investigated the saturable absorption influence of graphene layers with natural stacking order in an erbium-doped fiber laser passive mode-locking. Mechanically exfoliated graphene saturable absorber (MEGSA) samples, ranging from 1 to 6 layers, were fabricated preserving their natural ABA stacking order and precisely characterized by 2D band profile from Raman spectroscopy. By incorporating the samples as saturable absorbers (SA) in the fiber laser, mode-locking performances with pulse duration from 670–780 fs and bandwidth from 3.8–4.6 nm could be generated. Also, we identified a transition in the mode-locking activation mechanism from non-self-starting, for monolayer and bilayer graphene, to self-starting, for trilayer and few-layer graphene, which is a strong indicative of fast-to-slow saturable absorption response dependence on the number of graphene layers.