Spatial Dynamics of Semiconductor Lasers

Download or read book Spatial Dynamics of Semiconductor Lasers written by John A. Houlihan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of semiconductor lasers over the past 40 years has been concerned with both their operating characteristics and their properties as a non-linear optical system. In particular, the transition from stable dynamical operation to a more complex dynamical state, when the number of degrees of freedom of the system is increased, is of great interest from technological as well as fundamental viewpoints. This thesis will examine two examples of this type of extension namely, the increase in the transverse size of the laser cavity and the effect of delayed external incoherent feedback, on the lasers dynamics. In the former case we will study a mechanism for the stabilization of the chaotic output of the laser and in the latter we will identify some instabilities and discuss their properties. Broad area lasers are ubiquitous in modern optical fiber networks, their main application being the pumping of erbium doped fiber amplifiers. They are characterized by their ease of fabrication and subsequent low cost. However, they display complex chaotic spatio-temporal dynamics at high output powers which leads to a loss in the spatial coherence of the laser beam. This loss in spatial coherence limits the applications of these devices and/or constrains the laser to operate at low output powers. We will analyse, both experimentally and theoretically, a simple technique which may be used to stabilize the output of these simple broad area lasers, namely transverse injection profiling. The mechanism for stabilization of these lasers is identified and an alternative implementation is discussed. In the remainder of the thesis, the effect of incoherent delayed feedback on a single transverse mode, multi-longitudinal mode semiconductor laser is experimentally analysed. This experiment is motivated by the large amount of theoretical and experimental work concerning both regular and phase conjugate optical feedback in semiconductor laser devices. In these situations, the dynamical evolution is determined by the coupling between the carriers, the optical intensity and the phase difference between the laser output and delayed field. In the incoherent case, the phase difference may be neglected. In particular, the effect of phase amplitude coupling, which plays a crucial role in the coherent and phase-conjugate feedback situations, may be neglected in the incoherent feedback case. This is because the external cavity system is no longer sensitive to small changes in the solitary laser frequency. However, the system still displays a number of intensity instabilities, similar to the coherent feedback case, whose nature will be discussed.