Abstract

An all-optical high speed modulator/switch is likely to be necessary in future optical communications and computing systems. Optical interaction in semiconductor laser amplifiers (SLAs) has been measured as a result of nearly degenerate four-wave mixing,^1,2 which is strong in a gain saturated regime. When gain saturation is strong enough, interaction occurs mainly through the shared carrier number in the active region of the SLA, and incoherent optical coupling can be dominant. In this case, the optical frequency difference between signal light and probe light does not have to be controlled and can be much wider than several gigahertz. This scheme achieves many functions including wavelength conversion, frequency chirp reduction, coherent-incoherent conversion, and signal inversion.

© 1990 Optical Society of America