LAUSR

In this paper, a new thin‐film saturable absorber (SA) that belongs to the MXene family is used to generate Q‐switched laser pulses. In constructing the SA, titanium carbide (Ti3C2Tx) powder obtained through a selective etching process is dispersed in polyvinyl alcohol solution before the mixture is dried to form a thin film. A small piece of the film is placed between two fiber ferrules to form a SA device and added to a laser cavity of an erbium‐doped fiber laser to produce Q‐switched pulses in the region of 1561 nm. The repetition rate of the pulses can be varied between 45.25 and 65.59 kHz with the corresponding pulse width of 5.04–3.11 μs when the pump power is increased from 29.8 to 66.3 mW. At the maximum output power of 8.17 mW, the highest pulse energy of 125 nJ is obtained.