Variable-polarization optical feedback induced high-quality polarization-resolved chaos synchronization in VCSEL

Abstract

In this paper, the influence of variable-angle polarization-rotated optical feedback on the polarization switching properties of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) is investigated theoretically and experimentally. The optical feedback (OF) level and the rotated polarization angle θ p of OF are considered. Two configurations of OF are used to re-injected parallel and orthogonal polarization modes back into the VCSEL. For the parallel OF, it is shown that polarization switching (PS) of VCSELs' modes can occur at a fixed feedback level and bias current with variable θ p. However, in case of orthogonal optical feedback, PS occurs only at certain values of θ p , particularly when the intensities of two polarization modes become comparable with each other. In the theoretical model for both OF conditions, there is good agreement between the experimental measurements and recent theoretical results reported in the literature. Index Terms-Vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), variable polarization angle, optical feedback, polarization switching (PS).

Polarization output power stabilization of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser

“…Recently, several theoretical and experimental works have investigated the polarization modes characteristics of VCSELs with either the conventional OF or a rotated polarization angle of OF [5,[7][8][9][10][11]. The dynamics of VCSEL under OF with a rotating polarization angle was shown to have a great potential in numerous applications such as free space optical communications for improved level of security at the physical layer [12][13][14], sensing [15], high frequency pulses generation and optical bi-stability [16]. However, in some cases, the OF has undesirable effects on the laser characteristics, which can result in unwanted instabilities in the laser output power, thus limiting the laser performance when used for example communication systems.…”