Injection characterization of packaged bi-directional diamond shaped ring lasers at 1550 nm
Date
2006-05-12Author
Bussjager, Rebecca
Erdmann, Reinhard
Kovanis, Vassilios
McKeon, Brian
Fanto, Michael
Johns, Steve
Hayduk, Michael
Osman, Joseph
Morrow, Alan
Green, Malcolm
Stoffel, Nancy
Tan, Songsheng
Shick, Charles
Bacon, Wesley
Beaman, Bryan
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The Air Force Research Laboratory, Binoptics Corp., and Infotonics Technology Center worked collaboratively to
package and characterize recently developed diode based ring lasers that operate at 1550 nm in a diamond shaped cavity.
The laser modes propagate bi-directionally; however, uniaxial propagation may be induced by optical injection or by
integrating a mirror. Round trip cavity length was 500 μm in 3.5 μm wide ridge waveguides, and four polarizationmaintaining
lensed fibers provided access to the input and output modes. A signal from a tunable diode laser, incident at
one port, served to injection lock both of the counter-propagating circulating modes. When the input signal was timeencoded
by an optical modulator, the encoding was transferred to both modes with an inverted time-intensity profile.
Performance, in terms of fidelity and extinction ratio, is characterized for selected pulsed and monochromatic formats
from low frequencies to those exceeding 12 GHz. A rate equation model is proposed to account for certain aspects of the
observed behavior and analog and digital applications are discussed.