Passively Q-switched operation of a 1.94 µm thulium-doped solid-state laser based on MXene V2CTx

MXene V2CTx has great practicability because it is not easy to degrade under ambient conditions. In this paper, a V2CTx saturable absorber (SA) was firstly applied to a passively Q-switched (PQS) laser, to the best of our knowledge. The V2CTx-SA was prepared by the spin-coating method. The linear absorption of the V2CTx-SA in the 1000–2200 nm region and the nonlinear absorption near 2 µm were studied. With the V2CTx-SA, a typical PQS operation at 1.94 µm was realized in a Tm:YAlO3 laser. The minimum pulse width produced by the PQS laser was 528 ns, and the peak power, repetition rate, and average output power were 10.06 W, 65.9 kHz, and 350 mW, respectively. Meanwhile, the maximum pulse energy was 6.33 µJ. This work demonstrates that the V2CTx can be used as an effective SA to obtain nanosecond pulses with high peak power and high repetition rate simultaneously.