Graphdiyne-decorated microfiber based soliton and noise-like pulse generation

Abstract Graphdiyne has an inborn band gap energy, where the minimal band gap is about from 0.46 to 1.22 eV, which shows great potential in ultrafast laser generation. In this work, we fabricate a graphdiyne-decorated microfiber and demonstrate its saturable absorption characteristics experimentally. This device is used as a saturable absorber to generate the conventional soliton and noise-like pulse in an erbium-doped mode-locked fiber laser. The conventional soliton with a spectral bandwidth of 2.45 nm can switch into noise-like pulse with 37.14 nm bandwidth by adjusting the pump power and the polarization controller. For the noise-like pulse, the mode-locked state has excellent stability with 2.17 nJ maximum pulse energy and 283 fs coherent peak duration. This work indicates that graphdiyne could be a remarkable nonlinear photonic device to explore the dynamics of various mode-locked pulses.