Characteristics of bistable localized emission states in broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with frequency-selective feedback

Abstract

Small-area bistable lasing spots (about 10 mu m full width at half maximum) can be created at different positions within the aperture of a broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (aperture diameter 80 mu m) with frequency-selective feedback from a grating in Littrow configuration, and an additional pinhole localizing feedback to a part of the laser. Their characteristics are analyzed depending on the grating tuning, injection current, and feedback strength. These spots are considered to be good candidates for self-localized cavity solitons, if the perturbation by boundaries can be reduced using devices with larger diameter

Chapter 6 Fundamentals and Applications of Spatial Dissipative Solitons in Photonic Devices

“…The cavity is closed by a frequency-selective element. In the first realization reported (Tanguy et al (2006(Tanguy et al ( , 2008a) it was a diffraction grating in the so-called Littrow configuration, where the first order of the grating is reflected back into the VCSEL. Other options are volume Bragg gratings ; Ackemann et al (2009)) or Fabry-Perot cavities and etalons (Fischer et al, 2000b).…”

Realization of a Semiconductor-Based Cavity Soliton Laser

“…We adopt a different approach, based on using a VCSEL in conjunction with a frequency-selective external cavity, which is attractive as it can be implemented with essentially any VCSEL structure, using off-the-shelf optical components. Encouragingly, previous experiments have demonstrated bistability in small-area VCSELs in similar feedback configurations [17,18]. The mechanism for bistability was shown to be due to phase-amplitude coupling [19], by which the different carrier densities of the lasing and non-lasing states imply different refractive index, and hence different cavity resonance frequencies.…”

From one- to two-dimensional solitons in the Ginzburg-Landau model of lasers with frequency-selective feedback

“…This system has been a topic of interest during the last years since it can display a variety of localized structures on top of a non-lasing background [15][16][17][18][19]. In this system, the (complex) intra-VCSEL field features nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics due to two-way coupling between the optical field and the inversion of the electronic population (driven by the injection current), while the feedback field obeys a linear equation which is linearly coupled to the main equation for the intra-VCSEL field.…”