Highly attenuating external cavity for picosecond-tunable pulse generation from gain/Q-switched laser diodes

Author

Bouchoule, Sophie ; Stelmakh, Nikolaï ; Cavelier, Marc ; Lourtioz, Jean-Michel

Author_Institution

Inst. d´´Electronique Fondamentale, Paris XI Univ., Orsay, France

Volume

29

Issue

6

fYear

1993

fDate

6/1/1993 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1693

Lastpage

1700

Abstract

The authors analyze in detail the behavior of gain/Q-switched Fabry-Perot laser diodes coupled to a highly attenuating, selective external cavity. Radical differences are shown as compared to the case of strong external feedback used in mode locking. A strong analogy with the case of pulsed lasers with a small quasi-monochromatic injection signal is indicated. Strong chirping is observed in single-mode emission, leading to tunable picosecond pulses after compression. Experiments are carried out on two types of devices. Picosecond pulses with very high tunability (40 nm) and repetition rates (>10 GHz) are obtained from 1.3-μm gain-switched laser diodes, the minimum pulsewidth being 2.5 ps

Keywords

Q-switching; high-speed optical techniques; laser cavity resonators; laser transitions; semiconductor lasers; 1.3 micron; attenuating external cavity; chirping is; compression; gain-switched laser diodes; gain/Q-switched Fabry-Perot laser diodes; picosecond-tunable pulse generation; repetition rates; selective external cavity; single-mode emission; tunable picosecond pulses; Chirp; Diode lasers; Fabry-Perot; Laser feedback; Laser mode locking; Optical coupling; Optical pulses; Pulse compression methods; Space vector pulse width modulation; Tunable circuits and devices;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9197

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/3.234423

Filename

234423