Diode-Pumped Solid-State Q-Switched Laser with Rhenium Diselenide as Saturable Absorber

Chun Li,Yuxin Leng,Jinjin Huo

doi:10.3390/app8101753

Abstract

We report a solid-state passively Q-switched Nd:YVO4 laser adopting rhenium diselenide (ReSe2) as saturable absorber (SA) materials. ReSe2 belongs to a type of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) materials and it has the weak-layered dependent feature beneficial for the preparation of few-layer materials. The few-layer ReSe2 was prepared by ultrasonic exfoliation method. Using a power-dependent transmission experiment, its modulation depth and saturation intensity were measured to be 1.89% and 6.37 MW/cm2. Pumped by diode laser and based on few-layer ReSe2 SA, the Q-switched Nd:YVO4 laser obtained the shortest Q-switched pulse width of 682 ns with the highest repetition rate of 84.16 kHz. The maximum average output power was 125 mW with the slope efficiency of 17.27%. Our experiment, to the best of our knowledge, is the first demonstration that used ReSe2 as SA materials in an all-solid-state laser. The results show that the few-layer ReSe2 owns the nonlinear saturable absorption properties and it has the capacity to act as SA in an all-solid-state laser.

Highlights

Few-layer materials are of great importance to researches and applications due to their unique optical and electronic characteristics
Current researches on few-layer materials are principally focused on graphene, insulating hexagonal boron nitride, topological insulators (TIs), black phosphorus (BP), and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) [1,2,3,4,5,6]
We firstly demonstrated a passively Q-switched Nd:YVO4 laser incorporating ReSe2 as saturable absorber (SA) in an all-solid-state laser

Summary

Introduction

Few-layer materials are of great importance to researches and applications due to their unique optical and electronic characteristics. Studies of TMDs have mainly concentrated on MoS2 , MoSe2 , WS2 , and WSe2 [7,8,9] They have a changed characteristic (such as electronic structure, band gap) with their different layer thickness, owing to interlayer interactions and the variations of screening. In different directions of the in-plane structure of ReSe2 , there are significant differences in properties, including phonon behavior, magnetic characteristics, transport properties, and so on [19] This material has a larger variation in physical, chemical, optical, and electrical properties, and it has great potential in applications [20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. Our experiment shows that the few-layer ReSe2 could be used as 1 μm SA in all-solid-state lasers

Preparation and Properties of Rhenium Diselenide

Transmission

Conclusions