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Optical fibres embedded with as-grown carbon nanotubes for ultrahigh nonlinear optical responses.

Qi XiaoJin XieGuangjie YaoKaifeng LinHao-Li ZhangLiu QianKaihui LiuJin Zhang
Published in: Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) (2023)
Photonic crystal fibre (PCF) embedded with functional materials has demonstrated diverse applications ranging from ultrafast lasers, optical communication to chemical sensors. [ 1 ] Many efforts have been made to fabricating carbon nanotube (CNT) based optical fibres by ex-situ transfer method, however, often suffer poor uniformity and coverage. [ 2 ] Here, we report the direct growth of CNTs on the inner walls of PCFs by the chemical vapour deposition method. A two-step growth method was developed to control the narrow diametre distribution of CNTs to ensure desirable nanotube optical transitions. In the as-fabricated CNTs embedded fibre, third-harmonic generation has been enhanced by ∼15 times compared with flat CNT film on fused silica. We further demonstrated a dual-wavelength all-fibre mode-locked ultrafast laser (∼1561 nm and ∼1064 nm) by integrating the 1.36±0.15 nm-diametre CNTs into two kinds of photonic bandgap PCF (HC-1550 and HC-1060) as saturable absorbers, using their S 11 (∼ 0.7 eV) and S 22 (∼ 1.2 eV) interband transition respectively. The fibre laser showed stable output of ∼10 mW, ∼800 fs pulse width and ∼71 MHz repetition rate at 1561 nm wavelength. Our results can enable the large-scale applications of CNTs in PCF-based optical devices. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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