Exploring Multistability in Semiconductor Ring Lasers: Theory and Experiment

Abstract

We report the first experimental observation of multistable states in a single-longitudinal mode semiconductor ring laser. We show how the operation of the device can be steered to either monostable, bistable, or multistable dynamical regimes in a controlled way. We observe that the dynamical regimes are organized in well-reproducible sequences that match the bifurcation diagrams of a two-dimensional model. By analyzing the phase space in this model, we predict how the stochastic transitions between multistable states take place and confirm it experimentally.

Optical injection in semiconductor ring lasers

“…A value of θ = −π/2 corresponds to unidirectional CW operation, while a value of θ = π/2 corresponds to unidirectional CCW operation. The validity of this two-dimensional phase space has been confirmed by experiments on a solitary SRL [18,19].…”

Bistability in an injection locked two color laser with dual injection

“…Patrycja Heinricht, 1,2 Benjamin Wetzel, 1,3 Stephen O'Brien, 1 Andreas Amann, 1,4 and Simon Osborne 1 A two color Fabry-Pérot laser subjected to optical injection in both modes is examined experimentally and theoretically. The theoretical analysis predicts a bistability between locked states due to a swallow-tail bifurcation, which is unique to the dual injection system.…”

“…1 Recently, dual-mode lasers, a family that includes vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), ring lasers, photonic crystal lasers, and two color Fabry-Pérot (FP) lasers, subjected to a single optical injection have been studied due to potential applications in all-optical signal processing. [2][3][4][5][6] An additional injected mode can also add functionality to multimode FP lasers. [7][8][9] However, the understanding of these dual injected FP lasers is complicated by the effects of the uninjected modes.…”

Fast random bits generation based on a single chaotic semiconductor ring laser

“…Thus to implement the feedback, we link two input/output ports of the SRL through an optical fiber, while the two other ports are used to capture the dynamics of the two directional modes. Theoretical analysis of this system can be done based on a single longitudinal-mode SRL model [16,21] extended with Lang-Kobayashi terms to account for the feedback [19,20]. Taking into account the effect of spontaneous emission noise, the dynamics can be described, in terms of the mean-field slowly varying complex amplitudes of the electric field associated with the two propagating modes E cw and E ccw , and the carrier number N aṡ…”