We demonstrate a polymer-free method that can routinely transfer relatively large-area graphene to any substrate with advanced electrical properties and superior atomic and chemical structures as compared to the graphene sheets transferred with conventional polymer-assisted methods. The graphene films that are transferred with polymer-free method show high electrical conductance and excellent optical transmittance. Raman spectroscopy and X-ray/ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy also confirm the presence of high quality graphene sheets with little contamination after transfer. Atom-resolved images can be obtained using scanning tunneling microscope on as-transferred graphene sheets without additional cleaning process. The mobility of the polymer-free graphene monolayer is as high as 63,000 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1), which is 50% higher than the similar sample transferred with the conventional method. More importantly, this method allows us to place graphene directly on top of devices made of soft materials, such as organic and polymeric thin films, which widens the applications of graphene in soft electronics.

The study presents a novel demonstration of a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) that is based on a silicon carbide (SixC1−x) saturable absorber. When the C/Si composition ratio is increased to 1.83, the SixC1−x film transforms from two-photon absorption to nonlinear saturable absorption, and the corresponding value reaches −3.9 × 10−6 cm/W. The Si-rich SixC1−x film cannot mode lock the EDFL because it induced high intracavity loss through two-photon absorption. Even when a stoichiometric SiC is used, the EDFL is mode locked, similar to an EDFL operating under weak nonlinear-polarization-rotation condition. A C-rich SixC1−x film containing sp2-orbital C–C bonds with a linear absorbance of 0.172 and nonlinear absorbance of 0.04 at a 181 MW/cm2 saturation intensity demonstrates nonlinear transmittance. The C-rich SixC1−x saturable absorber successfully generates a short mode-locked EDFL pulse of 470 fs. The fluctuation of the pulse-train envelope dropps considerably from 11.6% to 0.8% when a strong saturable-absorption-induced self-amplitude modulation process occurs in the C-rich SixC1−x film.

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Hybrid mode-locking of non-polarized Er-doped fiber laser with nonlinear saturable absorption of MoS2 nano-flake doped ultrathin polyvinyl alcohol film is demonstrated to obtain 330-fs pulsewidth.