A Widely Tunable Three-Section DBR Lasers for Multi-Species Gas Detection

Abstract

We demonstrate a widely tunable distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) laser operating at 1.8-µm, in which the DBR section was butt-jointed InGaAsP (λ = 1.45 μm) material. Through current and temperature tuning, a widely tuning range of over 11 nm with a side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) higher than 30 dB is obtained. Utilizing this DBR laser, the water and methane detection experiment has been successfully implemented, which illustrates the potential capacity of such DBR laser as the light source used for multispecies gas sensing. The work also illustrates that the butt-joint active-passive integration technology developed for the InGaAsP quantum-wells (QWs) can be successfully applied in the InGaAs QWs.

Low fabrication cost wavelength tunable WG-FP hybrid-cavity laser working over 1.7 μm

“…In this paper, the materials of the devices were grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) equipment. Combined with the experiences of material epitaxy in our group [5,7,10] , we chose InGaAs/InGaAsP multi-quantum wells (MQWs) as the active region and the whole material structure was epitaxially grown on an n-type InP substrate. The strained MQW consisted of four pairs of 9.5 nm compressively strained InGaAs wells and 12 nm five tensile strained InGaAsP barriers embedded in two undoped InGaAsP (λ PL = 1.3 μm, where PL stands for photoluminescence) separate confinement layers (SCH).…”