Q-switched Tm-doped fiber lasers using dynamic microbends in oval-coating fibers

Abstract

We present Q-switched pulse generation in a thulium-doped fiber laser by inducing a piezoelectric-driven microbend into an oval-coating fiber. The oval-coating fiber is made of a single-mode fiber in which an acrylic coating is flattened by thermal pressing. A pulse peak power of 1.45 W is obtained with a pump power of 139 mW.

Mode-locked thulium-doped fiber laser at 1982 nm by using a gold nanorods saturable absorber

“…All fiber lasers offer advantages, such as compact geometry, efficient heat dissipation, low cost, and alignment-free operation, when compared to solid-state lasers [1]. Thulium (Tm)-doped fiber lasers that operate around an 'eye-safe' wavelength range of 2 μm have been rapidly developed over the last decade due to a variety of applications including molecular spectroscopy, biomedical diagnostics, surgery, remote sensing, free-space communication and LIDAR [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Tm-doped fibers have wide and smooth gain spectrum from 1.8 to 2.1 μm, implying that ultra-short laser pulses can be generated from Tm-doped fiber lasers.…”