Continuous wave and rhenium disulphide passively Q-switched Nd:GdLaNbO4 laser under direct pumping

A continuous wave (CW) and passively Q-switched 1.06μm Nd:GdLaNbO4 laser under direct 879 nm pumping is firstly reported in this paper. The CW output power and slope efficiency varied from 4.50 W and 45.6% to 6.55 W and 50.0% when the indirect pumping of 808 nm was changed to the direct pumping of 879 nm. Furthermore, the beam quality was also improved significantly. For the CW Nd:GdLaNbO4 laser, as is known to all that the highest output power with excellent beam quality was obtained. In the Q-switched operation, rhenium disulfide (ReS2) synthetized by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method was employed as a saturable absorber (SA). The optical properties and atom force microscope (AFM) image of ReS2 were measured and recorded to characterize it. A maximum average output power with 312 mW, a narrowest pulse width with 400 ns, and a highest repetition rate with 147 kHz were obtained under the direct 879 nm pumping.