Strong Optical Injection Locking of Edge-Emitting Lasers and Its Applications
Abstract
Semiconductor lasers are essential components that enable high-speed long-haul communication and have been widely used for various applications in photonics technology. Semiconductor lasers under optical injection locking exhibit superior performance over free-running lasers and provide useful applications not achievable through the free-running lasers. The performance of injection-locked lasers has been found to be significantly improved with stronger injection. In this dissertation, the characteristics and applications of semiconductor lasers under strong optical injection locking are presented and analyzed in various aspects. First, ultra-strong (injection ratio R ~10 dB) optical injection locking properties are investigated experimentally and theoretically. Direct modulation responses of ultra-strong optical injection-locked distributed feedback (DFB) lasers show three distinctive modulation characteristics depending on frequency detuning values. These different optical properties and electric modulation characteristics can be utilized in various applications such as analog fiber optic link, broadband digital communications, RF photonics and opto-electronic oscillators (OEOs). Using the strong injection-locked lasers, a novel single sideband generation has been demonstrated. A modulation sideband on the longer wavelength side is enhanced due to the resonant amplification by the slave laser's cavity mode, resulting in a 12-dB asymmetry at 20-GHz RF modulation. The dispersion limited RF bandwidth has been greatly increased by maintaining the variation of fiber transmission response within 7 dB up to 20-GHz RF carrier frequency over 80-km fiber transmission. Second, to improve fiber optic link performances, gain-lever distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers have been fabricated. With a gain-lever modulation, 9-dB increase of a link gain has been achieved compared with a standard modulation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 18, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA473953
Entities
People
- Hyuk-kee Sung
Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley