Operation Characteristics of a Side-Light-Injection Multiple-Quantum-Well Bistable Laser for All-Optical Switching

Abstract

An InGaAs/InAlAs side-light-injection multiple-quantum-well bistable laser for all-optical switching has been developed. It consists of one main bistable laser and two waveguides perpendicular to the main laser. Saturable absorption and gain quenching are used for set and reset operations. The voltages applied to the gain quenching and saturable absorption regions, which are located at the intersections of the main laser and the waveguide regions, are +1.00 and +0.29 V, respectively. As the input light intensity ( 1.55 µm range) increases, the turn-on and turn-off times decrease. The turn-on time is 200 ps when the input light peak intensity is 1 mW and the turn-off time is 2 ns when the input light peak intensity is 200 mW. The experimental results are supported by numerical simulation. Higher differential gain material is expected to enable faster switching speed.

Nonequilibrium model for semiconductor laser modulation response

“…The pump contribution in (6) is (15) where injected current density; electron charge; , steady-state electron or hole distribution and density in the absence of a laser field, respectively; pump blocking due to the exclusion principle [10]. Finally, we treat nonradiative carrier losses in the quantum-well and barrier regions with the terms in (4)-(6) containing the effective carrier decay rates and .…”

“…In this section, we discuss two examples involving the high speed modulation of a VCSEL. First, we consider a VCSEL where the output intensity is modulated by a sinusoidally varying injection current, i.e., in (15) (16)…”

“…Together, they give rise to a higher average plasma temperature for s . The barrier states can be bypassed if we modulate the quantum-well population directly with an external optical field that is resonant with the laser transition [15]. To incorporate the external optical field, we include in (4) and 5 which describes the change in quantum-well population due to stimulated emission or absorption of an external optical field with frequency , sinusoidal modulation , and intensity .…”