High Power Q-Switched Thulium Doped Fibre Laser using Carbon Nanotube Polymer Composite Saturable Absorber

Maria Chernysheva; Chengbo Mou; Raz Arif; Mohammed AlAraimi; Mark Rümmeli; Sergei Turitsyn; Aleksey Rozhin

doi:10.1038/srep24220

High Power Q-Switched Thulium Doped Fibre Laser using Carbon Nanotube Polymer Composite Saturable Absorber

Sci Rep. 2016 Apr 11:6:24220. doi: 10.1038/srep24220.

Authors

Maria Chernysheva¹, Chengbo Mou^{1

2}, Raz Arif^{1

3}, Mohammed AlAraimi^{1

4}, Mark Rümmeli⁵, Sergei Turitsyn^{1

6}, Aleksey Rozhin¹

Affiliations

¹ Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (AIPT), Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, United Kingdom.
² The Key Laboratory of Specialty Fiber Optics and Optical Access Network, Shanghai University, 200072, Shanghai, China.
³ Physics Department, Faculty of Science, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq-Kurdistan Region.
⁴ Engineering Department, Al Musanna College of Technology, 314, Muladdah Musanna, Sultanate of Oman.
⁵ Leibniz Institute of Solid State and Materials Research, IFW, Helmholtzstraβe 20, 01069 Dresden, Germany.
⁶ Novosibirsk State University, 2 Pirogova Str., Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia.

Abstract

We have proposed and demonstrated a Q-switched Thulium doped fibre laser (TDFL) with a 'Yin-Yang' all-fibre cavity scheme based on a combination of nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) and nonlinear amplified loop mirror (NALM). Unidirectional lasing operation has been achieved without any intracavity isolator. By using a carbon nanotube polymer composite based saturable absorber (SA), we demonstrated the laser output power of ~197 mW and pulse energy of 1.7 μJ. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest output power from a nanotube polymer composite SA based Q-switched Thulium doped fibre laser.