Expand this Topic clickable element to expand a topic
Skip to content
Optica Publishing Group

Single-frequency semiconductor lasers?

Not Accessible

Your library or personal account may give you access

Abstract

Within the last decade, very significant advances have been made in semiconductor lasers. These advances were direct results of the various specific requirements demanded by optical fiber communications on semiconductor lasers as the light source. In the 1970s, research and development have been concentrated in laser stripe geometries for achieving stable transverse fundamentalmode operation required for efficient and stable coupling into then multimode optical fibers. In the early 1980s, with the advent of low-loss singlemode fiber at 1.57 μm, it became obvious that development of a single-frequency semiconductor laser operating at 1.57 μm would be very important in very high-data-rate long-distance transmission. This fueled the research and development of semiconductor laser schemes for single-longitudinalmode control. Two schemes of major interest are distributed feedback (DFB) and cleaved-coupled-cavity (C3 ). While the wavelength of a DFB laser is fixed at the time of manufacturing by the grating period, that of a C3 laser is electrically tunable. While the side-mode suppression, linewidth, and threshold of a DFB laser depend on the relative position of the end facet with respect to the grating period, those of a C3 laser depend on the gap separation between the two coupled cavities. While the DFB scheme is incorporateable only to certain stripe-geometry laser structures and is technologically feasible for lasers beyond certain lasing wavelengths (due to difficulties in fabricating very short grating periods), the C3 scheme is applicable to all laser structures and wavelengths. Thus the choice depends on the specific applications in mind. Although these lasers were called single-frequency sources, they fell very short of their given name for three major yet unresolved problems.

© 1986 Optical Society of America

PDF Article
More Like This
Research on high-speed single-frequency semiconductor lasers

Herwig Kogelnik
ME1 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 1985

Linewidth broadening and mode splitting due to weak feedback in single-frequency 1.5-μm lasers

R. W. TKACH and A. R. CHRAPLYVY
MI5 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 1986

Single-Frequency Semiconductor Diode Lasers for Gas Sensing

Ramon U. Martinelli
LTuA.1 Laser Applications to Chemical and Environmental Analysis (LACSEA) 1998

Select as filters


Select Topics Cancel
© Copyright 2024 | Optica Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved