Triturating versatile carbon materials as saturable absorptive nano powders for ultrafast pulsating of erbium-doped fiber lasers

Five triturating nano-scale carbon materials based saturable absorbers are compared for passively mode-locked high-gain erbium-doped fiber lasers (EDFLs), including few-layer graphene nano-sheets, graphite, graphene oxide, carbon black and charcoal nano-particles. Nonlinear transmittance analyses show that these nano-scale carbon powders with saturation intensity increased from 0.8 to 6.1 MW/cm super(2) can reduce their modulation depth (M sub()D from 60% (few-layer graphene) to 23% (charcoal nano-powder). Except few-layer graphene, other carbon materials exhibit Raman scattering spectra with enlarged D-peaks and attenuated 2D-peaks. Even with the nonlinear absorbance slightly decreased from 5.4 x 10 super(-2) (few-layer graphene) to 3.7 x 10 super(-2) (charcoal), these carbon material powders still start the mode-locking of the EDFLs with