Active manipulation of light in optical fibres has been extensively studied with great interest because of its compatibility with diverse fibre-optic systems. While graphene exhibits a strong electro-optic effect originating from its gapless Dirac-fermionic band structure, electric control of all-fibre graphene devices remains still highly challenging. Here we report electrically manipulable in-line graphene devices by integrating graphene-based field effect transistors on a side-polished fibre. Ion liquid used in the present work critically acts both as an efficient gating medium with wide electrochemical windows and transparent over-cladding facilitating light–matter interaction. Combined study of unique features in gate-variable electrical transport and optical transition at monolayer and randomly stacked multilayer graphene reveals that the device exhibits significant optical transmission change (>90%) with high efficiency-loss figure of merit. This subsequently modifies nonlinear saturable absorption characteristics of the device, enabling electrically tunable fibre laser at various operational regimes. The proposed device will open promising way for actively controlled optoelectronic and nonlinear photonic devices in all-fibre platform with greatly enhanced graphene–light interaction.

We demonstrate an efficient all-fiber saturable absorber (SA) that evanescently interacts with a graphene monolayer. Strong nonlinear interaction between the graphene sheet and evanescent wave was realized in both experiments and numerical calculations by employing an over-cladding structure on high-quality monolayer graphene that uniformly covered the side-polished fiber. A passively mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser was built, including our in-line graphene SA, which stably generated ultrashort pulses with pulse duration of 377 fs at a repetition rate of 37.7 MHz. The corresponding 3-dB spectral bandwidth of the laser was measured to be 8.6 nm at the central wavelength of 1607.7 nm. We also experimentally observed that the spectral bandwidth and pulse duration of the laser output could be controlled by proper selection of the refractive index of the over-cladding material on the monolayer-graphene SA.

Twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) has received substantial attention in various research fields due to its unconventional physical properties originating from Moiré superlattices. The electronic band structure in tBLG modified by interlayer interactions enables the emergence of low-energy van Hove singularities in the density of states, allowing the observation of intriguing features such as increased optical conductivity and photocurrent at visible or near-infrared wavelengths. Here, we show that the third-order optical nonlinearity can be considerably modified depending on the stacking angle in tBLG. The third-harmonic generation (THG) efficiency is found to significantly increase when the energy gap at the van Hove singularity matches the three-photon resonance of incident light. Further study on electrically tuneable optical nonlinearity reveals that the gate-controlled THG enhancement varies with the twist angle in tBLG, resulting in a THG enhanced up to 60 times compared to neutral monolayer graphene. Our results prove that the twist angle opens up a new way to control and increase the optical nonlinearity of tBLG, suggesting rotation-induced tuneable nonlinear optics in stacked two-dimensional material systems.

We demonstrate an optically tunable graphene saturable absorber to manipulate the laser operation in pulsed fiber laser system. Owing to the strongly enhanced evanescent field interaction with monolayer graphene, we could realize an efficient control of modulation depth in the graphene saturable absorber by optical means through cross absorption modulation method. By integrating the tunable graphene saturable absorber into the fiber laser system, we could switch the laser operation from Q-switching through Q-switched mode-locking to continuous wave mode-locking by adjusting only the optical power of the control beam. In addition, we realized a hybrid Q-switching of fiber laser by periodical modulation of the absorption of the graphene saturable absorber, where we observed that the repetition rate of the Q-switched laser could be continuously tuned according to the modulation frequency of the applied external signal.