Investigation of Saturable and Reverse Saturable Absorptions for Graphene by Z-Scan Technique

The optical nonlinear absorption (NLA) property of multilayer graphene was investigated by Z-scan technique with picosecond laser pulse of 532-nm wavelength. Graphene samples were fabricated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with different number of layers, which were 1-, 8-, and 16-layer. The dependence of NLA coefficient α (I) on number of layers was investigated under the laser intensity of 7-80 GW/cm². The results showed that α (I) increased as the number of layer increased, and decreased as the laser intensity increased. Nonlinearities of graphene were mainly caused by saturable absorption (SA) effect. The 1-, 8-, and 16-layer graphene exhibited SA nonlinearity. However, reversed SA (RSA) nonlinearity was observed for 16-layer graphene only. The RSA was resulted from two-photon absorption due to layer stacking-induced bandgap opening, confirmed by the α (I) measurement. The RSA may reduce the stability of mode-locking and therefore, it suggests that the lower layer stacking in CVD fabricated graphene is preferable to use as saturable absorbers in laser mode-locking.