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Iron-doped binary and ternary chalcogenide crystals are very promising for tunable solid-state lasers operating over the 3-6 μm spectral range. The most significant results have been reported for iron doped ZnSe crystals with 9.6 W output power in CW at 77K when pumped by radiation of Cr:ZnSe laser, and 1.4 J at ~150 ns pulse duration at room temperature (RT) when pumped by the radiation of HF laser. The lifetime of the upper laser level 5T2 of the Fe2+ ion in a ZnSe matrix falls with temperature from 52µs at 77 K to 370 ns at RT due to the increase of nonradiative relaxation. It allows effective laser oscillation in the gain-switched regime at RT and operation in Q-switched regime at low temperature. We report on RT gain-switched Fe:ZnSe lasers tunable over 3.60-5.15 µm pumped by radiation of mechanically Q-switched Er:YAG laser operating at 2.94 µm. The maximum output energy was measured to be 5 mJ under 15mJ of pump energy. The long upper level lifetime of Fe:ZnSe gain medium is sufficient for energy storage with pumping by radiation of free running Er:YAG lasers. We demonstrated that Q-switched regime of oscillation could be effectively utilized for Fe:ZnSe lasers. The rotating back mirror was used as a mechanical Q-switcher of a Fe:ZnSe laser. The maximum output energy in single 150 ns pulse was measured to be 3mJ which is ~25% from the theoretical limit. This approach could be attractive for development of high-energy short-pulse solid-state mid-IR systems operating over 3.6-5.0 µm spectral range
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Vladimir V. Fedorov, Dmitry Martyshkin, Krishna Karki, Sergey Mirov, "Mechanically Q-switched and gain switched Fe:ZnSe lasers tunable over 3.60-5.15 µm (Conference Presentation)," Proc. SPIE 10896, Solid State Lasers XXVIII: Technology and Devices, 1089609 (13 March 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2511788