Graphene mode-locked Tm,Ho-codoped crystalline garnet laser producing 70-fs pulses near 21 µm

Abstract

Bilayer graphene synthesized by chemical vapor deposition is successfully applied as a saturable absorber (SA) for the passive mode-locking of a Tm,Ho:CLNGG laser at 2093nm. Near transform-limited pulses as short as 70 fs, i.e., 10 optical cycles, are produced at a 89 MHz repetition rate with 69 mW average output power. To the best of our knowledge, these are the shortest pulses ever reported from graphene-SA mode-locked Tm, or Ho-lasers in the 2 µm spectral region, including bulk and fiber lasers.