Passive Q-switching of an erbium fiber laser using nonlinear reflection from a liquefying gallium mirror

Summary form only given. It is well known that the incorporation of a suitably fast nonlinear element within a laser system can lead to Q-switched operation. For Q-switching of a typical fiber laser response times of the order of 10 ns to 1 /spl mu/s are required and are readily obtained for practical system parameters using a liquefying gallium nonlinearity (LGN). In this paper we describe a Q-switched Er-doped fiber laser based on the use of an LGN mirror.