Q-switched Erbium-doped fiber laser at 1600 nm for photoacoustic imaging application.
We present a nanosecond Q-switched Erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser system operating at 1600 nm with a tunable repetition rate from 100 kHz to 1 MHz. A compact fiber coupled, acousto-optic modulator-based EDF ring cavity was used to generate a nanosecond seed laser at 1600 nm, and a double-cladding EDF based power amplifier was applied to achieve the maximum average power of 250 mW. In addition, 12 ns laser pulses with the maximum pulse energy of 2.4μJ were obtained at 100 kHz. Furthermore, the Stokes shift by Raman scattering over a 25 km long fiber was measured, indicating that the laser can be potentially used to generate the high repetition rate pulses at the 1.7μm region. Finally, we detected the photoacoustic signal from a human hair at 200 kHz repetition rate with a pulse energy of 1.2μJ, which demonstrates that a Q-switched Er-doped fiber laser can be a promising light source for the high speed functional photoacoustic imaging.
Zhonglie
0000-0001-9328-4716
Z
Piao
Beckman Laser Institute, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California , Irvine, California 92612, USA.
Lvming
L
Zeng
Beckman Laser Institute, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California , Irvine, California 92612, USA.
Zhongping
Z
Chen
Department of Cogno-Mechatronics Engineering, Pusan National University , Busan 609-735, South Korea.
Chang-Seok
CS
Kim