Plasmon-driven Ultrafast and Highly Efficient Saturable Absorption for Ultrashort Pulse Generation Based on 2D V2C
Abstract
Plasmon-driven ultrafast nonlinearities hold promise for advanced photonics but remain challenging to harness in two-dimensional materials at telecommunication wavelengths. Here, we demonstrate few-layer V2C MXene as a high-performance saturable absorber by leveraging its tailored surface plasmon resonance. Combining transient absorption spectroscopy and first-principles calculations, we unveil a plasmon-driven relaxation mechanism dominated by interfacial high-energy hot electron generation (~100 fs), enabling giant ultrafast nonlinearities. Crucially, at the communication band (1550 nm), V2C exhibits a high saturable absorption coefficient of -1.35 cm/GW. Integrating this into an erbium-doped fiber laser, we generate mode-locked pulses with a duration of 486 fs at 1569 nm, a 39.51 MHz repetition rate, and exceptional stability (92 dB SNR). This work establishes plasmonic MXenes as a paradigm for tailored ultrafast photonic devices.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.17617,
title = {Plasmon-driven Ultrafast and Highly Efficient Saturable Absorption for Ultrashort Pulse Generation Based on 2D V2C},
author = {Yingwei Wang and Li Zhou and Quan Long and Xin Li and Haolin Chang and Ning Li and Yiduo Wang and Bei Zhang and Zhihui Chen and Zhongjian Yang and Si Xiao and Chujun Zhao and Shuangchun Wen and Jun He},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.17617},
year = {2025}
}