The present disclosure discloses a saturable absorber mirror of a composite structure, including: a substrate; a buffer layer on the substrate; a distributed Bragg reflective mirror on the buffer layer; a quantum dot or quantum well saturable absorber body on the distributed Bragg reflective mirror; a graphene saturable absorber body on the quantum dot or quantum well saturable absorber body. In the present disclosure, the graphene saturable absorber body is composited with the quantum dot saturable absorber body or the quantum well saturable absorber body to be used as the saturable absorber body in the saturable absorber mirror of the present disclosure. A thermal damage threshold and an optical property stability of the saturable absorber body are improved, and an ultrafast laser pulse with high power and short pulse mode locking, a stable output repetition cycle, a narrow pulse width, and a short response time is implemented.

The aim of the invention is to machine a material by application of non-linear radiation. The aim is achieved by modifying the laser radiation emitted by a laser beam source with the aid of a polarization modulator in such a way that laser radiation focused into the material is polarized in a linear fashion, the direction of polarization varying across the cross section of the beam.

A principle which enables the generation of macroscopic Fock and sub-Poissonian states is disclosed. Generic components of the system include: an electromagnetic structure (possessing one or more electromagnetic resonances), a nonlinear electromagnetic element (such as a nonlinear crystal near or inside the structure), and a source of light. In one embodiment, stimulated gain is used to create large numbers of photons in a cavity, but with very low photon number noise (uncertainty) in the cavity, and thus acts as a Fock laser. This Fock laser is capable of producing these states due to a very sharp intensity-dependent gain (or loss) that selects a particular photon number. The disclosed system and method are robust against both atomic and optical decoherence. Various examples of the new Fock laser design are also described.

A Q switch resonator includes: an optical resonator comprising at least two mirrors, and configured to accumulate power of a continuous wave or an intermittent continuous wave incident from an outside; and a switching element provided in the optical resonator. The switching element is configured such that, when the power accumulated in the optical resonator increases to a predetermined level, the switching element outputs an optical pulse by lowering a Q factor from a first level to a second level lower than the first level.

Various techniques provide nanostructure-based optical limiters for facilitating aperture protection. In one example, a method includes receiving, via a first window, incident light on a solution, where the solution includes liquid medium, a gas dissolved in the liquid medium, and nanostructures in contact with the liquid medium. The method further includes generating heat in the liquid medium based on oscillations of a subset of the plurality of nanostructures in response to the incident light. The method further includes releasing at least a portion of the gas from the solution as gas bubbles in response to the generated heat. The method further includes scattering, by the released gas bubbles, the incident light to prevent the incident light from reaching a second window. Related systems and products are also provided.

An optical device may include a sacrificial limiter filter including at least one layer of graphene disposed on a substrate. The at least one layer of graphene may be configured to absorb and scatter at least a portion of electromagnetic radiation incident on the at least one layer of graphene.

The aim of the invention is to machine a material by application of non-linear radiation. The aim is achieved by modifying the laser radiation emitted by a laser beam source with the aid of a polarization modulator in such a way that laser radiation focused into the material is polarized in a linear fashion, the direction of polarization varying across the cross section of the beam.

Optical component (10) for modulating light field (1) incident thereon, particularly amplitude and/or phase in dependency on intensity (I) thereof, includes stack (11) of refractive layers (12, 13) on substrate (14), made of materials having third-order nonlinearity, and having alternatingly varying refractive indices (n), including linear contribution (n.sub.0) and non-linear contribution (n.sub.2), and determining reflectance and transmittance spectra of the optical component, wherein refractive layers (12, 13) are configured such that reflectance and transmittance of the optical component have a Kerr effect based dependency on intensity (I) of the incident light field with n=n.sub.0+I.Math.n.sub.2, and refractive layers (12, 13) are made of at least one of dielectric and semiconductor layers, wherein non-linear contribution (n.sub.2) is below 10.sup.12 cm.sup.2/W. A resonator device including the optical component, a method of modulating a light field using the optical component and a method of manufacturing the optical component are described.

A two-dimensional semiconductor saturable absorber mirror comprises an optical fiber, a two-dimensional semiconductor thin film attached to an end surface of the optical fiber, and a gold film attached to the two-dimensional semiconductor thin film. A method for fabricating the two-dimensional semiconductor saturable absorber mirror comprises the following steps: cutting the optical fiber, putting the cut optical fiber and a two-dimensional semiconductor target into a vacuum chamber, ionizing a surface of two-dimensional semiconductor target to generate two-dimensional semiconductor plasma, depositing the two-dimensional semiconductor plasma on an exposed end surface of the optical fiber to form the two-dimensional semiconductor thin film, and by controlling deposition time and/or deposition temperature, ensuring the two-dimensional semiconductor thin film to be a desired thickness; and plating the gold film on the resulting two-dimensional semi-conductor thin film.

The invention relates to a method for manufacturing mirrors with saturable semiconducting absorptive material, which includes: depositing a saturable semiconducting absorptive material (205) onto a growth substrate (200) in order to form a structure; depositing at least one metal layer onto the structure such as to form a first mirror (211); and depositing a heat-conductive substrate (212) onto the metal layer by electrodeposition through an electrically insulating mask (312), allowing the selective deposition of the thermally conductive substrate, in order to predefine the perimeter of the mirrors with saturable semiconducting absorptive material.