Passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser via a D-shape-fiber-based MoS_2 saturable absorber with a very low nonsaturable loss

We report on the generation of conventional and dissipative solitons in erbium-doped fiber lasers by the evanescent field interaction between the propagating light and a multilayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) thin film. The MoS₂ film is fabricated by depositing the MoS₂ water-ethanol mixture on a D-shape-fiber (DF) repetitively. The measured nonsaturable loss, saturable optical intensity, and the modulation depth of this device are 13.3%, 110 MW/cm², and 3.4% respectively. Owing to the very low nonsaturable loss, the laser threshold of conventional soliton is as low as 4.8 mW. The further increase of net cavity dispersion to normal regime, stable dissipation soliton pulse trains with a spectral bandwidth of 11.7 nm and pulse duration of 116 ps are successfully generated. Our experiment demonstrates that the MoS₂-DF device can indeed be used as a high performance saturable absorber for further applications in ultrafast photonics.