Two-dimensional palladium ditelluride: A novel saturable absorption material for ultrafast fiber lasers.

• Two-dimensional PdTe 2 is a novel saturable absorption material which has been rarely reported. • Few-layer PdTe 2 nanosheets are prepared by the simple and effective ultrasonic liquid exfoliation method. • Yb-doped mode-locked fiber laser with a pulse width of 887.2 ps is realized using PdTe 2 /PVA as the saturable absorber. In this work, two-dimensional few-layer palladium ditelluride (PdTe 2) nanosheets are produced by the simple and effective ultrasonic liquid exfoliation method and used as novel saturable absorber in an Yb-doped mode-locked fiber laser. The results show that the prepared flexible PdTe 2 /PVA composite film has a modulation of 3.7% and a saturation intensity of 77.6 MW/cm2. The obtained Yb-doped mode-locked fiber laser based on the film shows a pulse width of 887.2 ps with a repetition and central wavelength of 8.921 MHz and 1069 nm, respectively. So far, there has been few reports on PdTe 2 as saturable absorbers to realize mode-locked fiber lasers. The results suggest that two-dimensional PdTe 2 has great potential applications in nonlinear optics and ultrafast photonics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]