Materials in the transition metal dichalcogenide family, including WS2, MoS2, WSe2, and MoSe2, etc., have captured a substantial amount of attention due to their remarkable nonlinearities and optoelectronic properties.Compared with WS2 and MoS2, the monolayered MoTe2 owns a smaller direct bandgap of 1.1 eV. It is beneficial for the applications in broadband absorption. In this letter, using the magnetron sputtering technique, MoTe2 is deposited on the surface of the tapered fiber to be assembled into the saturable absorber. We first implement the MoTe2-based Q-switched fiber laser operating at the wavelength of 1559 nm. The minimum pulse duration and signal-to-noise ratio are 677 ns and 63 dB, respectively. Moreover, the output power of 25 mW is impressive compared with previous work. We believe that MoTe2 is a promising 2D material for ultrafast photonic devices in the high-power Q-switched fiber lasers.
Tungsten disulfide(WS_2) is a type of anisotropic-layered compound and has broadband saturable absorption features as saturable absorbers(SAs). With WS_2-based SAs, dark solitons in erbium-doped fiber(EDF) lasers are first obtained. For the generated dark solitons, the center wavelength is measured to be 1530 nm, and the repetition rate is about 116.5 MHz. A series of optical spectra is exhibited. The electrical signal-to-noise ratio is better than 94 d B.Results in this paper demonstrate that WS_2-based SAs are the promising SAs for generating dark solitons in EDF lasers.