Large area growth of monolayer MoS2 film on quartz and its use as a saturable absorber in laser mode-locking

Monolayer MoS2 film on quartz was fabricated by a home-made three-temperature zone chemical vapor deposition method. The photo, AFM image, Raman spectroscopy and HRTEM image showed that high quality as-grown MoS2 film completely covered the whole quartz substrate of a few cm2. A Nd:YVO4 laser with mode-locking operation was obtained by using the monolayer MoS2 on quartz as the saturable absorber (SA). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on large-area growth of high quality monolayer MoS2 film on transparent quartz substrate, and the first time that the CVD MoS2 SA was used in mode-locked solid state lasers. Because of the large area, high transmission, low non-saturable loss and high optical damage threshold of this material, it is very suitable for application in mode-locked solid state lasers.