Single-walled carbon nanotube saturable absorber for a diode-pumped passively mode-locked Nd,Y:SrF2 laser

A reflective single-walled carbon nanotube as saturable absorber has been firstly adopted to a passively mode-locked Nd,Y:SrF2 crystal. Without any dispersion compensation, the stably mode-locked laser delivers pulses with pulse width as short as 1.7 ps, repetition rate of 107.8 MHz and center wavelength of 1056 nm. The oscillator produces maximum average output power of 319 mW corresponding with a high slope efficiency of 20.2%. The single pulse energy and the peak power are 2.96 nJ and 1.74 kW, respectively. The experimental results show that single-walled carbon nanotube is an excellent saturable absorber for mode-locked lasers. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved