Impact of monolithic saturable absorber on the performance of subharmonically mode-locked lasers at millimeter-wave frequencies

Author

Bao, H.C. ; Wen, Y.J. ; Liu, H.F.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Electron. Eng., Melbourne Univ., Parkville, Vic., Australia

Volume

14

Issue

9

fYear

2002

Firstpage

1354

Lastpage

1356

Abstract

A detailed comparison of the characteristics of 40-GHz pulses from a subharmonic mode-locked monolithic laser diode with and without a saturable absorber (SA) is demonstrated in terms of timing jitter, frequency detuning, amplitude modulation, and extinction ratio. The experimental results show that saturable absorption in the laser cavity improves the extinction ratio and suppresses amplitude modulation and timing jitter, while no SA section in the laser cavity is cost-effective and offers subharmonically mode-locked pulses a larger frequency detuning range.

Keywords

amplitude modulation; distributed feedback lasers; integrated optics; laser cavity resonators; laser mode locking; optical pulse generation; optical saturable absorption; semiconductor lasers; timing jitter; 40 GHz; 40-GHz pulse characteristics; amplitude modulation; extinction ratio; frequency detuning; frequency detuning range; gain switched distributed feedback laser diode; laser cavity; millimeter-wave frequencies; monolithic saturable absorber; subharmonic mode-locked monolithic laser diode; subharmonically mode-locked lasers; subharmonically mode-locked pulses; timing jitter; Absorption; Diode lasers; Distributed feedback devices; Frequency; Laser feedback; Laser mode locking; Optical pulse generation; Optical pulses; Pulse compression methods; Semiconductor lasers;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1041-1135

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LPT.2002.801055

Filename

1032378