Photonic microwave time delay using slow- and fast-light effects in optically injected semiconductor lasers

Abstract

This study numerically and experimentally investigates a photonic approach for microwave time delay, which takes advantage of the redshift of the laser cavity resonance induced by external optical injection in a semiconductor laser. The strong enhancement around the redshifted cavity resonance not only amplifies the power, but also shifts the phase of the microwave signals carried by the optical injection. Such a microwave phase shift is approximately linear over a few gigahertz, leading to a constant microwave time delay over the frequency range. A different time delay can be achieved by simply adjusting the injection power or frequency. For the microwave frequencies up to 40 GHz investigated in this Letter, a continuously tunable range of more than 80 ps in time delay is achieved over an instantaneous bandwidth of approximately 7 GHz. The quality of the data carried by the microwave signals is mostly preserved after time delay. Thus, a bit-error ratio down to 10 at 2.5 Gb/s is achieved with a possible detection sensitivity improvement of 5 dB.

Period-One Laser Dynamics for Photonic Microwave Signal Generation and Applications

“…Applications of P1 dynamics of an OISL in diverse signal generation and photonic microwave signal processing, were also described, including the following: LFM waveform generation, MFC generation, chaotic signal generation, microwave frequency conversion, optical DSB-to-SSB conversion, and photonic microwave carrier recovery. It should be noted that other potential applications of the P1 dynamics-based microwave signal generator have also been reported, such as triangular waveform generation [68], optical pulse generation [69], photonic microwave signal amplification [70], photonic microwave time delay [71], microwave frequency measurement [72], and lidar and radar systems [73,74], which are not discussed in this paper.…”

Numerical study of noise-induced transitions in nonlinear dynamics of optically injected semiconductor lasers

“…Since the 1980s, a semiconductor laser subject to external optical injection has attracted much research interest due to its potential applications [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and profound physics [21][22][23][24][25]. Tuning the power and frequency of the optical injection destabilizes the laser through a period-doubling route to chaos, which has been observed numerically [26] and experimentally [27].…”