Abstract
We experimentally investigated the use of a bulk-structured bismuth telluride () topological insulator (TI) as a saturable absorption material for passive -switching of a fiber laser at . Unlike previous TI-based -switched laser implementations that employed high-quality nanostructured TI saturable absorbers, we chose to use a bulk-structured TI film because it is easy to fabricate. Our saturable absorber was constructed by depositing a bulk-structured, thick TI film, which was prepared by using a mechanical exfoliation method, on the flat side of a side-polished fiber. The modulation depth of the evanescent field interaction-based saturable absorber was measured to be at . Passively -switched pulses were readily obtained by incorporating the saturable absorber into an all fiberized erbium fiber-based ring cavity. The minimum temporal width was measured to be at a repetition rate of . Through an output performance comparison between our -switched laser and recently demonstrated -switched fiber lasers incorporating nanostructured TI-based saturable absorbers, the pros and cons of our bulk-structured TI-based saturable absorbers were analyzed.
© 2014 Optical Society of America
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