Nickel-vanadium layered double hydroxide nanosheets as the saturable absorber for a passively Q-switched 2 µm solid-state laser.

Nickel-vanadium (NiV)-layered double hydroxide (LDH) was fabricated into a novel saturable absorber (SA) by the liquid phase exfoliation method and utilized as the laser modulator for the first time, to our best knowledge. We investigated a passive Q-switched Tm:YAG ceramic laser at 2 µm with the NiV-LDH SA. Under an absorbed pump power of 7.2 W, the shortest pulse width of 398 ns was obtained with an average output power of 263 mW and a pulse repetition frequency of 101.8 kHz, corresponding to a single pulse energy at 2.30 µJ. The results indicate that the NiV-LDH SA has great research potential in the field of laser modulation.