  Due to its unique electronic property and the Pauli Blocking Principle,
atomic layer graphene possesses wavelength-independent ultrafast saturable
absorption, which can be exploited for the ultrafast photonics application.
Through chemical functionalization, a graphene-polymer nanocomposite membrane
was fabricated and firstly used to mode lock a fiber laser. Stable mode locked
solitons with 3 nJ pulse energy, 700 fs pulse width at the 1590 nm wavelength
have been directly generated from the laser. We show that graphene-polymer
nanocomposites could be an attractive saturable absorber for high power fiber
laser mode locking.
