Experimental investigation on Q switching and Q switched mode locking operation

We report on the generation of Q-switched and Q-switched mode-locked (QML) pulses in an erbium-doped fiber ring laser by using a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) -based gold nanorod (GNR) saturable absorber (SA). The PVAbased GNR SA has a modulation depth of -4.8% and a non-saturable loss of -26.9% at 1.5 μm