Kifle Esrom, Mateos Xavier, Loiko Pavel, Choi Sun Yung, Bae Ji Eun, Rotermund Fabian, Aguiló Magdalena, Díaz Francesc, Griebner Uwe, Petrov Valentin
Opt Express. 2018 Feb 19;26(4):4961-4966. doi: 10.1364/OE.26.004961.
A Tm monoclinic double tungstate planar waveguide laser is passively Q-switched (PQS) by a saturable absorber (SA) based on single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) randomly oriented in a polymer film. The laser is based on a 18 µm-thick 5 at.% Tm:KY-x-yGdxLuy(WO) active layer grown on an undoped (010)-oriented KY(WO) substrate by liquid phase epitaxy with determined propagation losses 0.7 ± 0.2 dB/cm. The PQS laser generated a maximum average output power of 45.6 mW at 1.8354 µm with a slope efficiency of 22.5%. Stable 83-ns-long laser pulses with an energy of 33 nJ were achieved at a repetition rate of 1.39 MHz. The use of SWCNTs as SA is promising for generation of sub-100 ns pulses in such waveguide lasers at ~2 µm.
