Noise of mode-locked semiconductor lasers

Low-Jitter and High-Power 40-GHz All-Active Mode-Locked Lasers

“…The pulsewidth for this measurement was 2.5 ps but the time-bandwidth product was 0.6 and a large amount of excess spectral components on the short wavelength side was present in the optical spectrum. Intracavity spectral filtering can be used to further lower the jitter [3], [7] and decrease the time-bandwidth product toward the transform limit, and improved jitter measurement methods are also expected to lower the measured values [6], [7].…”

“…It originates from spontaneous emission and carrier noise and can be reduced in a number of ways [3], among these, increasing the inversion of the gain medium, lowering the roundtrip loss, and increasing the pulse energy. For long all-active lasers, a large part of the loss is due to the pulseshaping dynamics [4].…”

New Role for Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos in Integrated Semiconductor Laser Technology

“…[2]. In integrated lasers, problems with reproduction may show up as unexpected dynamics of the output field, quite often referred to as unstable behavior or just noise [3,4]. However, it is the aim of this Letter to demonstrate that the output dynamics of the integrated optical devices which we have experimentally investigated are well behaving, well understandable, and well classifiable in terms of nonlinear dynamics.…”

“…Such a configuration, consisting of a long amplifier section with a short absorber in the center, is designed to produce a train of picosecond optical pulses, but in practice the intended dynamics are hard to achieve. Instead, a variety of other dynamics may be observed, depending on the precise settings of the external control parameters, in this case the bias current and the absorber voltage [3,4]. The measurement setup is depicted in Fig.…”

Spectral Methods for Determining the Stability and Noise Performance of Passively Modelocked Lasers

“…By contrast, this approach has been extensively applied to averaged models of soliton lasers, and it is only possible to point to a selection of the published work. Haus [29] has applied this approach with his collaborators to study the stability [56] and timing jitter [43] in solid-state lasers, in fiber lasers [57], and in diode lasers [58]. Kärtner et al [41] extended this approach to lasers that are locked using slow saturable absorbers.…”