Open AccessNanocomposites with gold nanorod/silica core-shell structure as saturable absorber for femtosecond pulse generation in a fiber laser
Author(s) -
Xude Wang,
AiPing Luo,
Hao Líu,
Nian Zhao,
Meng Li,
Yanfang Zhu,
Jian-Ping Xue,
ZhiChao Luo,
WenCheng Xu
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.23.022602
Subject(s) - ultrashort pulse , materials science , nanorod , saturable absorption , femtosecond , laser , fiber laser , optics , optoelectronics , photonics , photonic crystal fiber , optical fiber , fiber , nanocomposite , absorption (acoustics) , nanotechnology , wavelength , composite material , physics
Ultrafast fiber lasers play a significant role in our society with many aspects ranging from fundamental physics to industrial purposes. Searching for high-performance saturable absorbers (SAs) is vital to the developments of ultrafast fiber lasers. Gold nanorods (GNRs) have been discovered to possess saturable absorption effect. However, a major obstacle to make the GNRs as high-performance and practical SA is the low optical damage threshold. To overcome this drawback, herein we proposed the nanocomposites with gold nanorods/silica core-shell structure (GNRs@SiO(2)) as a high-performance SA for ultrashort pulse generation in a fiber laser. The GNRs@SiO(2) SA presents a modulation depth of 4.2% and nonsaturable loss of 45.6%. With the proposed GNRs@SiO(2) SA, 379 fs pulse was directly obtained from the fiber laser. The achieved results demonstrated that the GNR@SiO(2) could be indeed a good candidate of high-performance SA towards practical applications in the field of ultrafast photonics.