TY - JOUR
T1 - Linewidth Sharpening in Optical Frequency Combs via a Gain Switched Semiconductor Laser with External Optical Feedback
AU - Fan, Yuanlong
AU - Li, Kang
AU - Li, Pu
AU - Copner, Bethan
AU - Copner, Nigel
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 21, 2020; revised September 1, 2020; accepted September 23, 2020. Date of publication September 25, 2020; date of current version January 2, 2021. This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61775158; and in part by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2018M630283 and Grant 2019T120197. (Corresponding author: Yuanlong Fan.) Yuanlong Fan, Kang Li, Bethan Copner, and Nigel Joseph Copner are with the Wireless & Optoelectronics Research & Innovation Centre, School of Engineering, University of South Wales, Treforest CF37 1DL, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1983-2012 IEEE.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/1/1
Y1 - 2021/1/1
N2 - In this article, we propose a novel scheme for an optical frequency comb (OFC) generator which implements a gain switched (GS) semiconductor laser (SL) in the presence of external optical feedback (EOF). Numerical results demonstrate that with appropriate choices of the basic system parameters (i.e., the feedback coupling fraction, the laser bias current and the external cavity length), the linewidths in the OFCs generated by the GS SL with EOF can be significantly reduced below that of the free running continuous wave (CW) SL. Such a significant linewidth reduction can be described by a simple analytic expression presented in this article which is found to be in good agreement with the numerical results.
AB - In this article, we propose a novel scheme for an optical frequency comb (OFC) generator which implements a gain switched (GS) semiconductor laser (SL) in the presence of external optical feedback (EOF). Numerical results demonstrate that with appropriate choices of the basic system parameters (i.e., the feedback coupling fraction, the laser bias current and the external cavity length), the linewidths in the OFCs generated by the GS SL with EOF can be significantly reduced below that of the free running continuous wave (CW) SL. Such a significant linewidth reduction can be described by a simple analytic expression presented in this article which is found to be in good agreement with the numerical results.
KW - Optical feedback
KW - optical frequency combs
KW - semiconductor lasers
U2 - 10.1109/JLT.2020.3026722
DO - 10.1109/JLT.2020.3026722
M3 - Article
SN - 0733-8724
VL - 39
SP - 105
EP - 111
JO - Journal of Lightwave Technology
JF - Journal of Lightwave Technology
IS - 1
M1 - 9205996
ER -