Silver nanorods absorbers for Q-switched Nd:YAG ceramic laser

The silver nanorods (Ag-NRs) with a longitudinal surface plasmon resonance (SPR) absorption peak at 1.06 μm band was synthesized through a seed-mediated growth method, and performance was investigated in a passively Q-switched Nd:Y3Al5O12 (YAG) ceramic laser for the first time. Under an absorbed pump power of 2.75 W, stable pulse trains with a pulse width of 197 ns were obtained. For the case of passively Q-switched operation, the maximum average output power of 114 mW was generated with a repetition rate of 223.7 kHz.