Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles as saturable absorber in passively Q-switched fiber laser
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2016
Abstract
We demonstrate a passively Q-switched erbium-doped fiber laser using zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles thin film as saturable absorber (SA). ZnO exhibits high nonlinear optical response and fast recovery time, fulfilling the requirements of an ideal SA. The nonlinear optical absorption is characterised by modulation depth of 3.5% with saturation intensity of 0.016 MW cm−2. We insert the SA into the laser cavity and obtain stable Q-switched pulse whereby the repetition rate increases from 41.7 kHz to 77.2 kHz while the pulse width decreases from 9.6 μs to 3.0 μs as the pump power is increased from 60 mW to 360 mW. This result suggests that ZnO could be a promising SA for photonic applications.
Keywords
Q-switched lasers, Zinc oxide, Saturable absorber, Fiber laser
Divisions
fac_eng
Funders
University of Malaya (grant no: LRGS(2015)NGOD/UM/KPT),Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia (grant no: GA010-2014(ulung))
Publication Title
Optics Communications
Volume
381
Publisher
Elsevier