Locking bandwidth of actively mode-locked semiconductor lasers

Ahmed, Z.; Zhai, L.; Lowery, Arthur J.; Onodera, Noriaki; Tucker, R.S.

doi:10.1109/3.234426

Cited by 31 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Injection locking has been extensively exploited in laser diodes to either stabilize their emission frequency or the laser cavity modes separation. The latter corresponds to the stabilization of the round‐trip frequency and it is normally achieved by injection of an external microwave signal directly on the driving current or through a small control in the cavity . Tuning of the cavity modes separation in a specific frequency range around the free running value using this approach has also been reported .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Injection locking of mid‐infrared quantum cascade laser at 14 GHz, by direct microwave modulation

St-Jean

Amanti

Bernard

et al. 2014

Laser & Photonics Reviews

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Compact laser sources operating in mid infrared spectral region with stable emission are important for applications in spectroscopy and wireless communication. Quantum cascade lasers (QCL) are unique semiconductor sources covering mid infrared frequency range. Based on intersubband transitions, the carrier lifetime of these sources is in the ps range. For this reason their frequency response to direct modulation is expected to overcome the limits of standard semiconductor lasers. In this work injection locking of the roundtrip frequency of a QCL emitting at 9 μm is reported. Inter modes laser frequency separation is stabilized and controlled by an external microwave source. Designing an optical waveguide embedded in a microstrip line a flat frequency response to direct modulation up to 14 GHz is presented. Injection locking over MHz frequency range at 13.7 GHz is demonstrated. Numerical solutions of injection locking theory are discussed and presented as tool to describe experimental results.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Injection locking of mid‐infrared quantum cascade laser at 14 GHz, by direct microwave modulation

St-Jean

Amanti

Bernard

et al. 2014

Laser & Photonics Reviews

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“…The laser was fed with a dc bias of 26 mA (109% of threshold), and a drive of 68 mA peak-peak at a frequency of 2.39 GHz. This bias was selected to prevent the pulses from having secondary peaks [12], and gave a continuous wave (CW) output power of 450 W. The drive frequency was tuned to below the resonant frequency of the cavity, ensuring that the pulse train was stable [13]. The laser oscillated in a single-chip mode due to the laser's chip being perfectly antireflection coated.…”

Section: Numerical Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of optical processing techniques for optical microwave signal generation

Lowery

Gurney

1998

IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Techn.

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Recently, there have been several proposals on using the higher RF harmonics of detected pulses from mode-locked semiconductor lasers as a source of microwave and millimeter waves. This paper compares the performance of three optical techniques of signal processing that have been proposed to select a higher harmonic of a mode-locked laser, by using extensive numerical simulations. We show that techniques using delays and splitters are insensitive to the coherence properties of the source, but can introduce amplitude patterning if pulses overlap when recombined. We see that techniques relying on optical filtering to select optical modes require extremely high-Q filters and, thus, are extremely sensitive to tuning. A Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) is the optimum filter method in terms of power efficiency for low harmonics, but using two separate bandpass filters can give comparable efficiency when selecting higher harmonics. We also show that gain-switched lasers are unsuitable as sources when used with narrow-band optical filtering techniques because of their low pulse-to-pulse optical coherence.

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“…This is one of the mode-locking techniques in which the temporal specifications of pulses are directly determined by choosing the phase, frequency and strength of the injected signal [2][3][4]. It is also used to reduce the frequency bandwidth [5,6], the noise [7,8] and the instability [9][10][11][12][13][14] of lasers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Four-wave mixing and generation of short pulses in multimode class B laser amplifiers

Jahanpanah

Moradi

2013

J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys.

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The linear and nonlinear amplification features of an optical signal by a multimode class B laser have been discussed. The four-wave mixing process between the cavity central mode and the amplified input signal produces a sequence of satellite lines. It is demonstrated that short pulses can be formed by phase beating the satellite lines. In the linear regime, the laser amplifier acts like a three-mode free-running laser where the oscillations of two right and left adjacent modes are substituted by those of the amplified input signal and its image satellite line. In the nonlinear regime, two more symmetrical adjacent satellite lines are first added to the cavity electric field components and then the frequency of the cavity central mode is shifted towards the image satellite lines. At the same time, the number of central-mode photons is gradually decreased by raising the input signal strength. The central-mode photons are ultimately reduced to zero, where an injection-locking phenomenon takes place. Finally, we derive a heuristic conservation relation between the input energies to the laser by sum of the pumping and injected signals, and those distributed between the signal and image satellite lines and spontaneous emission radiation.

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Locking bandwidth of actively mode-locked semiconductor lasers

Cited by 31 publications

References 48 publications

Injection locking of mid‐infrared quantum cascade laser at 14 GHz, by direct microwave modulation

Injection locking of mid‐infrared quantum cascade laser at 14 GHz, by direct microwave modulation

Comparison of optical processing techniques for optical microwave signal generation

Four-wave mixing and generation of short pulses in multimode class B laser amplifiers

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