Z. Sun, T. Hasan, F. Torrisi, D. Popa, G. Privitera, F. Wang, F. Bonaccorso, D.M. Basko and A.C. Ferrari

The exceptional optoelectronic properties of graphene make it an ideal material for many applications. Here Sun et al. use a graphene-polymer composite fabricated with wet-chemistry techniques to make a wavenlength-independent saturable absorber, which they use to passively mode-lock an erbium-dope fiber laser. The resulting ultrafast laser produces pulses of several hundreds of femtoseconds at telecom wavelengths. This work could suggest using metamaterials as passive or active elements to drive the dynamics of ultrafast laser cavities.