Ta4C3 MXene as a saturable absorber for femtosecond mode-locked fiber lasers

Ta4C3 as one of the MXene has been widely investigated in the application of materials chemistry, biomedicine, electrochemical energy storage and other fields. However, the study of its optical properties and applications remains rare. In this work, few-layer Ta4C3 MXene are prepared and its optical properties and applications are systematically investigated. We develop few-layer Ta4C3 MXene through the liquid phase exfoliation (LPE) method, and prepare it as Ta4C3 saturable absorber (SA). To obtain femtosecond pulses, the Ta4C3-SA is inserted further to an erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL) cavity. It is worth noting that in the experiment the EDFL composed of Ta4C3-SA can generate stable femtosecond pulses, and the spectral bandwidth and duration of the femtosecond pulses are 1559.6 nm and 350 fs, respectively. Meanwhile, the numerical simulation results consistent with the experimental results. The results reveal that Ta4C3 MXene has great application potential in nonlinear optics and ultrafast photonics.