Electrooptic sampling evaluation of 1.5 μm metal-semiconductor-metal photodiodes by soliton compressed semiconductor laser pulses

An electrooptic sampling system using soliton compressed pulses from a gain switched laser diode was assembled and used to characterize an InGaAs metal-semiconductor-metal photodetector at the important optical fiber wavelength of 1.55 microns. The measured rise time of the photodiode pulse was 6.5 ps. The pump and probe pulses had a FWHM of 0.6 ps as measured by autocorrelation. The sampling system rise time was evaluated to be 2.0 ps, yielding the estimated intrinsic photodiode rise time of 2.3 ps. By introducing a differential detection scheme and optical filtering, a shot noise limited sensitivity of 0.6 mV/Sqrt[Hz] was achieved. These results represent the fastest rise time, and most sensitive semiconductor laser based, electrooptic sampling system reported to date