Simple Fabrication of Paper-like Graphene Oxide for use as Saturable Absorber in Q-switching of Fiber Laser

Yuen-Kiat  Yap; Fauzan  Ahmad; Wu-Yi  Chong; Harith  Ahmad

doi:10.6180/jase.202108_24(4).0007

Simple Fabrication of Paper-like Graphene Oxide for use as Saturable Absorber in Q-switching of Fiber Laser

Yuen-Kiat Yap This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.^1,2 , Fauzan Ahmad³ , Wu-Yi Chong¹ , and Harith Ahmad^1,4

¹Photonics Research Centre, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
²Heriot-Watt University Malaysia, Precinct 5, 62200 Putrajaya, Malaysia
³Department of Electronic System Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Technology Malaysia, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
⁴Physics Department, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Received: October 28, 2020
Accepted: January 22, 2021
Publication Date: August 1, 2021

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202108_24(4).0007

ABSTRACT

The rise of graphene has made its derivatives a much sought-after research in nano-material science. One of which that has attracted substantial interest is graphene oxide. Due to its simple top-down synthesis and bandgap tunability, graphene oxide is suited in optoelectronics and photonics applications. Foil or paper-like graphene oxide possesses excellent mechanical strength especially. In this work, we demonstrated a home-made, paper-like graphene oxide for Q-switching operation in a ring erbium-doped fiber laser. The raw material was synthesized using simplified Hummers’ method, and subsequently by simple filtration. The free-standing, orderly stacked material is about 6.5 nm thick, corresponding to about 6−7 layers of uniform sheets. The paper-like material was then transferred directly to a fiber ferrule and sandwiched between two connectors via a fiber adapter. Q-switched pulses were observed when the pump power of the ring laser was increased to about 68 mW. The Q-switched fiber laser has maximum repetition rate, pulse energy, pulse width and average power of 21.5 kHz, 52 nJ, 3.8 µs and 1.1 mW respectively.

Keywords: Grapheme oxide, Nano-material, Pulsed fiber laser, Q-switched, Repetition rate, Pulse width

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