Multivalued Stability Map of an Injection-Locked Semiconductor Laser

We present a novel and detailed analysis of the locking range and the stability map for side-mode injection-locked in-plane semiconductor multimode lasers. By including the usually neglected unlocked modes in our model, we predict a multivalued locking range and stability map for this type of lasers. We also explain and relate, the previously noticed slave laser bistability phenomenon with the multivalued character of the locking range and stability map, and experimentally validate our findings. Moreover, we find that the unstable operating region, commonly found in literature by stability analysis of the injection-locked mode alone, is actually much smaller.