Abstract

Q-switched fiber lasers have found a number of applications such as medical treatment, micromachining, diagnostics and others. All-fiber pulsed lasers are of special interest since exhibiting all advantages of fiber lasers, namely compactness, absence of mechanical elements, long time stability etc. One of the promising ways to build such pulsed laser scheme consists in the application of a fiber saturable absorber. Thus, in [1] it was demonstrated that a placing of Sm-doped fiber in the cavity of Yb-doped fiber laser allows one to get the pulse generation with energy of approximately 20 μJ and time duration of 650 ns. Another approach was applied in [2], where Bi-doped fiber played a role of the saturated absorber. Bi active centers have the long lifetime, ~ 1 ms. To solve this problem Bi-doped fiber was placed in a separate cavity to achieve a laser action at its wavelength and consequently to decrease the lifetime of the active centers in the excited state. That allowed authors to demonstrate the stable pulsed lasing with the pulse energy up to 0.1 mJ and the pulse duration in a range of approximately 1-2 μs. In this paper we suggest a new laser configuration with Ho-doped fiber as a saturable absorber.

© 2009 IEEE