Abstract
We report on the characterization and analysis of the spectroscopic properties of an Er3+-doped Ba(Zr,Mg,Ta)O3 (Er:BZMT) transparent ceramic showing a disordered perovskite structure. The Judd-Ofelt model was applied to estimate the radiative lifetimes and branching ratios of the 1.5 and 3 µm emission transitions, which are potential for laser operation. The experimental fluorescence lifetimes of the transitions of 4I13/2 → 4I15/2 and 4I11/2 → 4I13/2 were recorded to calculate the radiative quantum efficiencies. According to the analysis, significant non-radiative relaxation processes from the 4I11/2 multiplets should exist in the Er:BZMT system, which makes this material more suitable for laser operation at 1.6 µm. Finally, the gain cross-section for the potential 1.6 µm laser emission was calculated, showing a broad tuning range from less than 1.6 µm to around 1.7 µm. This result also indicates that femtosecond level laser pulses are possible using Er:BZMT as laser gain medium.
© 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement
1. Introduction
Er3+-doped laser materials have attracted much attention in laser generation and amplification systems, owing to the demands of optical communication, LIDAR systems at around 1.6 µm, and remote sensing at 3 µm. Bulk and fiber gain materials are the main research directions in this area. For the Er3+-doped fibers, they are favorable for broadband and flexible wavelength selectivity [1,2], because of the spectral broadening induced by the glassy disordered structure. Ultra-short pulses can also be generated benefiting from the large gain bandwidth up to tens of nanometers in fibers. Up to now, femtosecond (fs) level pulse width has been generated from Er3+-doped fiber lasers [3,4]. However, despite the advantages in broad gain bandwidth in Er3+-doped fiber lasers, there are still obvious limitations. For example, in 1.6 µm Er,Yb fiber lasers, the wavelength is limited to less than ∼1625 nm [1]. Another limitation is that the fiber lasers have low damage threshold and obvious nonlinear effects, e.g., stimulated Raman scattering and self-phase modulation, which limit the output power of the ultra-fast lasers.
Some bulk Er3+-doped materials can also provide broadband gain bandwidth. More importantly, the nonlinear effects are usually negligible in bulk materials, which lead to less possibility of damage. Thus, these materials can not only be used directly for the generation of ultra-short laser pulses, but also can be employed in the amplifier to further increase the power level. In this case, the gain bandwidth of the bulk material is the principal limiting factor for efficient pulse amplification while maintaining the laser spectrum and the pulse width. At 1.5 µm, the Er:glass is typically used in mode-locked 1.5 µm solid state lasers. This material can support laser pulses shorter than 100 fs [5]. Nevertheless, the glass shows low damage threshold and relatively low thermal conductivity (<1 Wm-1K-1) [6], which will make them difficult for high power laser generation. Thus, a laser material with broad gain bandwidth and high damage threshold is necessary for a high power ultra-fast laser system.
Recently, a novel host material, transparent BZMT ceramic has been developed [7]. This type of ceramic has an ABO3 perovskite structure. Since Zr4+, Mg2+, and Ta5+ have similar ionic radii (Zr4+: 72 pm, Mg2+: 72 pm, Ta5+: 64 pm), they can be randomly distributed in the B site of BZMT [8]. Coordination number in the A- and B-site is 12 and 6, respectively [7]. Meanwhile, the rare-earth active ions can be introduced into the B site with charge compensation being fulfilled by tuning the ratio of Zr4+, Mg2+, and Ta5+. Such disordered structure results in spectral broadening of the active ion. In the 1 µm wavelength region, a broadband emission spectrum has been observed from a Nd:BZMT ceramic [9], and a pulse width of 196 fs has been reported from a mode-locked Nd:BZMT laser [8]. Moreover, the thermal conductivity (3.1 Wm-1K-1) and thermal shock parameter (302 Wm-1) of BZMT ceramics [7] are much higher than those of glass materials, which suggests a higher thermal damage threshold in BZMT. Therefore, BZMT based gain materials are excellent candidates for the high-power and ultra-fast laser systems. Further, the wide spectrum is also beneficial for achieving tunable laser wavelength.
In this work, the spectroscopic properties of the Er:BZMT ceramic were characterized, and Judd-Ofelt analysis was performed in order to evaluate the potential of Er:BZMT ceramic as gain medium, in both the 1.6 µm and the 3 µm spectral regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the Er:BZMT laser gain medium.
2. Experimental results and discussions
The Er:BZMT ceramic provided by Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. has a composition of Ba(Er0.05Zr0.225Mg0.225Ta0.5)O3. About 5 mol% Er3+ was substituted into the B site of BZMT. The detailed manufacturing process can be found in [7]. To characterize its spectral properties, a thin sample was cut from the ceramic with a cross-section of ∼5 mm × 5 mm and a thickness of 1 mm. Both two surfaces of the samples were well polished in order to reduce the scattering loss during the measurements.
First, the transmission spectrum was measured with a spectrophotometer (UV3600Plus, Shimadzu) at room temperature. Figure 1 shows the transmission spectrum of the Er:BZMT ceramic sample. As a comparison, the predicted Fresnel transmittance was also calculated according to:
where R = (n-1)2/(n+1)2 represents the theoretical reflectivity on the surface and n is the refractive index of BZMT ceramic [9]. Here multi-reflections between the two surfaces of the ceramic are taken into account since the thickness of the ceramic sample is only 1 mm. From Fig. 1, we can see that this ceramic has a wide transmission spectrum. At wavelengths above 600 nm, the measured transmittance is almost consistent with that of the predicted value. Taking the transmittance values at 1300 nm for instance, the measured transmittance is 78.8%, which is the same as the theoretical Fresnel transmittance, i.e., 78.8%, indicating that the scattering loss inside the ceramic sample is small and can be ignored, and high optical quality of the ceramic can be guaranteed. At shorter wavelength, a significant increase of the losses induced by the Rayleigh scattering was observed, which should be attributed to the inevitable small amount of defects, such as grain boundary pores in the ceramic.The absorption coefficient α(λ) was calculated by:
The nominal doping concentration of Er3+ in the BZMT can be calculated to be 6.9 × 1020 cm-3 from the cell parameters. We can therefore obtain the absorption cross-section according to the doping concentration. The absorption cross-section at 976 nm, 1470 nm and 1539 nm is 6.3 × 10−20 cm2, 1.0 × 10−21 cm2, and 5.2 × 10−20 cm2, respectively, which are lower than that of Er:YAG [10], but have similar values with that of Er:glass [11,12]. Then, the parameters describing the spectroscopic properties of Er:BZMT, including the intensity parameters, theoretical oscillator strengths, radiative lifetimes, and branching ratios that relate to the 1.6 µm and 3 µm laser emissions are calculated using Judd-Ofelt analysis. Here, all the transitions in Fig. 2 were within consideration for the purpose to reduce the possible fitting errors. The experimental oscillator strengths fexp can be given by [13]:
The theoretical oscillator strengths for the electric-dipole (ED) and magnetic-dipole (MD) induced absorptions, $\left. {\left| {{l^N}SLJ} \right.} \right\rangle \to \left| {\left. {{l^N}{S^{\prime}}{L^{\prime}}{J^{\prime}}} \right\rangle } \right.$ and $\left. {\left| {{l^N}SLJ} \right.} \right\rangle \to \left| {\left. {{l^N}SL{J^{\prime}}} \right\rangle } \right.$, can be given by [13]:
The spontaneous radiative decay rate A and branching ratio β for $\left| {{l^N}SLJ} \right\rangle \to \left| {{l^N}{S^{\prime}}{L^{\prime}}{J^{\prime}}} \right\rangle $ transition can be given by [13]:
The calculated radiative transition rates, fluorescence branching ratios and radiative lifetimes from 4I13/2, 4I11/2, 4I9/2 levels relating to the 1.6 µm and 3 µm laser emissions are shown in Table 2. The radiative lifetime of 4I13/2 levels is 6.41 ms, which is comparable with that of Er-doped garnets [15] and glasses [12]. However, different from these materials, the radiative lifetime of 4I11/2 level is longer than that of 4I13/2. This can be explained by the fact that the MD interaction has a large contribution to the 4I13/2 → 4I15/2 transition while emission transitions from the 4I11/2 manifold are dominated by ED interaction. It is known that the reduced matrix elements of MD transition do not vary much with host material. Therefore, the MD oscillator strength of the 4I13/2 → 4I15/2 transition is mainly impacted by refractive index. The large refractive index of BZMT (>2.0 at 1.6 µm) leads to a large AMD and thus a short lifetime. Similar results can also be found from the Er:LaAlO3 crystal [17].
To further characterize the two potential laser transitions at 3 µm and 1.6 µm, the fluorescence lifetimes (τf) of the 4I11/2 and 4I13/2 multiplets were measured excited by a 976 nm laser diode. The laser diode was run in quasi-continuous wave mode and the pulse durations for the fluorescence at 3 µm and 1.6 µm were set to be 100 µs and 2 ms, respectively, with rising and falling times less than 6 µs. The fluorescence decay curves were recorded by two fast detectors (Vigo FIP-1K-1G-F-ND, Thorlabs DET10D/M), respectively. Figure 3 shows the fluorescence decay curves for the transition of 4I11/2 → 4I13/2 and 4I13/2 → 4I15/2. The best fitted lifetime of 4I11/2 and 4I13/2 was 188 µs and 9.5 ms, respectively. We can therefore calculate the radiative quantum efficiency ηq by:
From Eq. (9), the radiative quantum efficiency for the 3 µm emission is only 2.3%, which is much lower than that of some other materials such as Er:Y2O3 [18] and Er:YAP [19]. The low quantum efficiency is believed to come from a high non-radiative relaxation induced by the high phonon energy (∼840 cm-1 [9]). In this case, it is difficult for the Er:BZMT ceramic to produce the 3 µm laser emission. On the contrary, the fast non-radiative relaxation from 4I11/2 is beneficial for 1.5 µm laser, because of the reduction of excited-state absorption (4I11/2 → 4F7/2), and energy transfer up-conversion (4I11/2 + 4I11/2 → 4I15/2 + 4F7/2) [20]. Further, for the 1.5 µm emission, the radiative quantum efficiency is over 100%. We believe that this error is caused by the reabsorption effect relating to 4I15/2 → 4I13/2, resulting in a longer fluorescence lifetime. In the further work, it is still possible to reduce the influence of re-absorption by reducing the doping concentration or adopting the pinhole method [21] to obtain more accurate results.
The fluorescence spectrum of the Er:BZMT sample for 4I13/2 → 4I15/2 is recorded with an optical spectrum analyzer (Q8381A, Advantest). Emission cross-section of the Er:BZMT ceramics can be further obtained according to the Füchtbauer–Ladenburg method [22]:
The gain cross-section of the Er:BZMT for the 1.5 µm wavelength band was calculated according to:
3. Summary
In conclusion, we have investigated the detailed spectroscopic properties of a high-quality transparent Er:BZMT ceramic. The disordered structure of the Er:BZMT ceramic leads to the broadening of the absorption and emission spectrum. Judd-Ofelt analysis was applied to calculate the spectroscopic parameters. The Judd-Ofelt intensity parameters of the Er:BZMT ceramic were estimated to be Ω(2) = 1.16 × 10−20 cm2, Ω(4) = 3.17×10−21 cm2, and Ω(6) = 3.20 × 10−21 cm2. The fluorescence lifetimes for the two typical emission bands, i.e., 1.6 µm and 3 µm were measured to be 9.5 ms and 188 µs, respectively. By comparing the measured and calculated lifetimes, we found that the 4I11/2 level has a low radiative quantum efficiency of 2.3%. For the potential laser emission in the 1.6 µm wavelength region, the emission cross-section was calculated. Further calculation of the gain spectrum indicates that fs level ultra-short laser pulses were possible to be generated from the Er:BZMT laser system. Further work will be focused on the characterization of Er:BZMT laser performance.
Funding
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (15KK0245, 18H01204); National Institute for Fusion Science (UFEX5003, ULHH040).
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge Satoshi Kuretake and Koji Murayama in Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. for the fabrication of the Er:BZMT ceramic.
Disclosures
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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