Mode-locked thulium-doped fiber laser at 1982 nm by using a gold nanorods saturable absorber

We demonstrated a passively mode-locked fiber laser operating at 1982 nm by using a gold nanorods (GNRs) saturable absorber (SA). The GNRs SA was fabricated by mixing GNRs with sodium carbonxymethyl cellulose. By inserting the GNRs SA into a Tm-doped fiber laser cavity pumped by a 1570 nm fiber laser, stable passively mode-locking was achieved with a threshold pump power of 224 mW, ∼4.02 ps pulses at 1982 nm with a repetition rate of ∼37.49 MHz, and a maximum average power of ∼6 mW was obtained for a pump power of ∼265 mW.