Passive mode-locking and Q-switching of 1.3 μm neodymium lasers with PbS doped glass

摘要

Compact, solid-state lasers emitting pico- and nanosecond pulses at 1.3μm are of particular interest for telecommunications. Saturable absorber Q-switching is, probably, one of the most efficient and easy-to-realize methods for obtaining short pulses from lasers. However, the list of solid-state saturable absorbers (SA) for 1.3-μm lasers is rather short. Recently, both mode-locking of 1.06 and 1.2-1.3 μm lasers and Q-switching of diode-pumped 1.06 and 1.5μm lasers have been achieved with PbS-doped glasses. In all cases strong quantum confinement in the semiconductor low-dimensional structures was used to tailor the absorption peak of the saturable absorber to the corresponding lasing wavelength. In this paper we present results of using PbS-doped phosphate glass with the first excitonic peak at 1.3μm as the SA for mode-locking of Nd:YAlO{sub}3 and Q-switching of Nd:YVO{sub}4 and Nd:KGd(W0{sub}4){sub}2 lasers.