Picosecond Soliton Pulse Generation with a Zinc Phthalocyanine Thin-Film Saturable Absorber Via Mode Locking in an Erbium-Doped Fiber Laser Cavity

In this paper, we employ a Zinc Phthalocyanine (ZnPc) organic material to construct a saturable absorber (SA) that is used in a laser cavity to generate mode-locked ultrashort pulses. The ZnPc exhibits excellent optical properties and broadband absorption. First, a ZnPc homogeneous solution is prepared, and then, it is mixed with a diluted polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) polymer solution. After the mixture is dried to form a thin film, a small piece is cut from it and fit in between two fiber ferrules to form an SA. When the SA is inserted in an erbium-doped fiber-laser EDFL cavity, a self-starting modelocked soliton laser is obtained. The laser operates at a wavelength of 1560 nm with a repetition rate of 1.826 MHz and a pulse width of 1.83 ps, with the pump power ranging from 102.91 to 335.65 mW. We believe that this is the first demonstration of soliton pulse generation using the ZnPc SA in the EDFL cavity.