Abstract

External optical cavity configurations are applied to semiconductor lasers for a variety of purposes: to study fundamental aspects of the laser dynamics (notably coherence collapse and chaotic phenomena), and to produce linewidth narrowing, mode-locking, bistability, and longitudinal or transverse and mode selection. Bistability has already been observed and studied in grating-tuned external cavity semiconductor lasers, and here we address the more general issue of multistability in these systems. We demonstrate that multistability can exist, and analyse the stability properties of the multistable solutions using static and dynamic models (the latter only in the limits of very weak and very strong feedback). Using the resulting stability criteria, we propose and demonstrate a novel method of exciting the multistable solutions to achieve controllable and possibly useful multistability.

© 1994 IEEE