Hybrid Neodymium-doped passively Q-switched waveguide laser

Abstract In the mid 80s, the doping of optical fibers’ core with rare earth atoms has been a major breakthrough in the field of optical telecommunications since it allowed the realization of in line optical amplifiers. However, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers are a few meters long and a huge effort has been made in order to realize compact and efficient active devices based on rare-earth-doped waveguides. For this purpose the use of phosphate glasses instead of silicate ones has been investigated because they allow a better solubility of the inserted rare earths. In this paper we present the realization of a hybrid Neodymium-doped passively Q-switched waveguide laser made by an ion-exchange on a Schott IOG-1 phosphate laser glass combined with the deposition of a bis(4-dimethylaminodithiobenzil)nickel (BDN) saturable absorber diluted in a cellulose acetate polymer cladding. In a first step, we present the continuous wave (CW) operation of the laser with an undoped cladding. We show that for a 3.5 μm wide, 1.5 cm long waveguide realized by a silver–sodium ion-exchange, a 6 mW output has been achieved by creating a Fabry–Perot cavity with dielectric multilayers mirrors sticked to the chip facets. Then, the characterizations performed on the BDN-doped layers are presented. It is shown that a proper selection of the hybrid guiding condition and saturable absorber concentration entail a non-saturated excess absorption of 3.4 dB/cm. Finally, we present the results we obtained on the Q-switched behaviour of the laser. Indeed a repetition rate of 330 kHz is achieved for a pulse energy of 10 nJ and a peak power of 1 W.