Tungsten is a transition-metal element that belongs to
the VIB
group and is one of the 90 naturally occurring elements. In this paper,
we prepared tungstenene nanosheets by liquid-phase exfoliation and
first demonstrated their nonlinear saturable absorption properties
at a 2 μm waveband. The high-performance 1.9 μm passively
Q-switched lasers were realized with tungstenene as a saturable absorber,
which exhibited the advantages of high repetition rate, short pulse
width, and high peak power. Under a pulse pumping mode with a repetition
rate of 10 Hz, the single-pulse energy and peak power reached 87.96
μJ and 605.81 W, respectively, which are superior to all two-dimensional
(2D) saturable absorbers reported before. These results have shown
that tungstenene can be used as a high-quality optical modulator for
a 2 μm laser.