Abstract
2-µm lasers are of particular interest for applications in medicine, remote sensing of CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere, optical communication systems, or time-resolved spectroscopy [1-3]. At this wavelength, most systems are nowadays based on Thulium, and Holmium-doped media. Ho-doped lasers are indeed attractive due to their emission above 2 µm, thus avoiding instabilities caused by water vapors absorption in air, and can be pumped at 1.9 µm with laser diodes, Co:Mg2F or Tm3+-doped lasers. Another way of pumping Ho-doped materials consists in co-doping Tm-containing materials with Ho, which allows to use powerful commercially available laser diodes around 790 nm. Among other laser hosts used to generate 2-µm emission, YLF has attractive properties, such as good thermal conductivity, low thermal-lensing effects and natural birefringence [4]. We then recently demonstrated for the first time a passively mode-locked laser featuring a (Tm,Ho)-co-doped YLF gain medium [5]. The laser was mode-locked with a reflective graphene saturable absorber (GSA) and generated picosecond pulses with 52 mW average power at 75 MHz repetition rate. However, the output pulse train exhibited a relatively high amplitude modulation of more than 10%. Here, we explore a novel laser configuration using a transmitting GSA and demonstrate better noise performances and output power.
© 2019 IEEE
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