70-fs mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser with topological insulator.

ABSTRACT

Femtosecond optical pulses have applications in optical communication, astronomical frequency combs, and laser spectroscopy. Here, a hybrid mode-locked erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser with topological insulator (TI) is proposed, for the first time to our best knowledge. The pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method is employed to fabricate the fiber-taper TI saturable absorber (TISA). By virtue of the fiber-taper TISA, the hybrid EDF laser is passively mode-locked using the nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE), and emits 70 fs pulses at 1542 nm, whose 3 dB spectral width is 63 nm with a repetition rate and transfer efficiency of 95.4 MHz and 14.12%, respectively. Our experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid mode-locked EDF lasers have better performance to achieve shorter pulses with higher power and lower mode-locking threshold in the future.