Two-photon absorption and saturable absorption of mid-IR in graphene

We report on the response of graphene to high intensity mid-IR radiation and show that graphene exhibits saturable absorption and significant two-photon absorption in the spectral region of 1.55 μm to 3.50 μm (0.35 eV to 0.80 eV). We find that the effective modulation depth of multilayer graphene is limited by two-photon absorption, which will affect its performance as a laser mode-locking element. The measured saturation intensities of femtosecond pulses were found to depend on the third power of photon energy when we combined our results with others reported in the literature, while those of longer pulses were found to have a square root dependence.