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L’essor des communications en espace libre transforme notre façon de partager l’information. La photonique moyen infrarouge y joue un rôle essentiel, permettant des échanges plus rapides et sécurisés, et ouvrant ainsi de nouvelles perspectives passionnantes pour les liaisons optiques.

A unique feature of quantum cascade lasers relies on the ultrafast carrier relaxation lifetime that occurs on a picosecond time scale. Furthermore, the very sharp electronic transitions among the conduction-band states (subbands) lead to specific selection rules, which in theory exclude the TE-polarized light emission. Under cross-polarization reinjection, we stimulate the polarization switching dynamics in such an intersubband device. The mid-infrared modulation signal is phase-shifted between the TM mode and the TE mode, with a typical microsecond time scale different from pure time-delay dynamics. We also prove that both the frequency and the duty cycle of the modulated pattern can be slightly tuned by varying the characteristics of the reinjected light. These results reveal the possibility of favoring the TE polarization in a quantum cascade laser and generating a square-wave modulation with cross-polarization reinjection.

This work experimentally investigates the impact of p-doping on the relative intensity noise (RIN) properties and subsequently on the modulation properties of semiconductor quantum dot (QD) lasers epitaxially grown on silicon. Owing to the low threading dislocation density and the p-modulation doped GaAs barrier layer in the active region, the RIN level is found very stable with temperature with a minimum value of −150dB/Hz. The dynamical features extracted from the RIN spectra show that p-doping between zero and 20 holes/dot strongly modifies the modulation properties and gain nonlinearities through increased internal losses in the active region and thereby hinders the maximum achievable bandwidth. Overall, this Letter is important for designing future high-speed and low-noise QD devices integrated in future photonic integrated circuits.

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have enabled numerous high performance, energy efficient, and compact technologies for optical communications, sensing, and metrology. One of the biggest challenges in scaling PICs comes from the parasitic reflections that feed light back into the laser source. These reflections increase noise and may cause laser destabilization. To avoid parasitic reflections, expensive and bulky optical isolators have been placed between the laser and the rest of the PIC leading to large increases in device footprint for on-chip integration schemes and significant increases in packaging complexity and cost for lasers co-packaged with passive PICs. This review article reports new findings on epitaxial quantum dot lasers on silicon and studies both theoretically and experimentally the connection between the material properties and the ultra-low reflection sensitivity that is achieved. Our results show that such quantum dot lasers on silicon exhibit much lower linewidth enhancement factors than any quantum well lasers. Together with the large damping factor, we show that the quantum dot gain medium is fundamentally dependent on dot uniformity, but through careful optimization, even epitaxial lasers on silicon can operate without an optical isolator, which is of paramount importance for the future high-speed silicon photonic systems.

This work reports on the influence of bias voltage applied on a saturable absorber (SA) on a subthreshold linewidth enhancement factor (LEF) in hybrid-silicon quantum dot optical frequency comb lasers. Results show that the reverse bias voltage on SA contributes to enlarge the LEF and improve the comb dynamics. Optical injection is also found to be able to improve the comb spectrum in terms of 3 dB bandwidth and its flatness. Such novel findings are promising for the development of high-speed dense wavelength-division multiplexing photonic integrated circuits in optical interconnects and datacom applications.

This work reports on a systematic investigation of the influence of optical feedback in InAs/GaAs quantum dot lasers epitaxially grown on silicon. The boundaries associated to the onset of the critical feedback level corresponding to the first Hopf bifurcation are extracted at different bias conditions with respect to the onset of the first excited state transition. Overall, results show that quantum dot lasers directly grown onto silicon are much more resistant to optical feedback than quantum well lasers, mostly resulting from a small linewidth enhancement factor of high-quality quantum dot material. However, results also unveil that the onset of the critical feedback level strongly depends on the excited-to-ground-state ratio, hence a figure of merit showing that a small ratio of the excited-to-ground-state lasing thresholds is not beneficial for maintaining a high degree of stability. This work brings further insights in the understanding of quantum dot laser physics and is useful for designing feedback resistant lasers for isolator-free transmission in metro, access, and data center optical networks, as well as for integrated photonics.

We experimentally compare the dynamics of InAs/GaAs quantum dot lasers under optical feedback emitting exclusively on ground states (GSs) or excited states (ESs). By varying the feedback parameters and putting focus either on their short or long cavity regions, various periodic and chaotic oscillatory states are found. The GS laser is shown to be more resistant to feedback, benefiting from its strong relaxation oscillation damping. In contrast, the ES laser can easily be driven into complex dynamics. While the GS laser is of importance for the development of isolator-free transmitters, the ES laser is essential for applications taking advantages of chaos.

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of a nonlinear delay differential equation model for passive mode-locking in semiconductor lasers, when the delay model is seeded with parameters extracted from the gain and loss spectra of a quantum dot laser. The approach used relies on narrowing the parameter space of the model by constraining the values of most of the model parameters to values extracted from gain and loss measurements at threshold. The impact of the free parameters, namely, the linewidth enhancement factors that are not available from the gain and loss measurements, on the device output is then analyzed using the results of direct integration of the delay model. In addition to predicting experimentally observed trends such as pulse trimming with applied absorber bias, the simulation results offer insight into the range of values of the linewidth enhancement factors in the gain and absorber sections permissible for stable mode-locking near threshold. Further, the simulations show that this range of permissible values progressively decreases with increasing bias voltage on the absorber section. This is important for telecomm and datacom applications where such devices are sought as pulsed sources, as well as in military RF photonic applications, where mode-locked diode lasers are used as low noise clocks for sampling.

The knowledge of the linewidth enhancement factor (H-factor) is very important to understand the performance of semiconductor lasers. It affects several fundamental aspects such as the linewidth, the laser's behavior under optical feedback, the chirp under direct modulation and the occurrence of the filamentation. The dramatic variation in the (H-factor that has been reported for quantum dot lasers makes them an interesting subject for optical feedback studies. In the particular case of QD lasers, the carrier density is not clearly clamped at threshold. The lasing wavelength can switch from the ground state to the excited state as the current injection increases meaning that a carrier accumulation occurs in the ES even though lasing in the GS is still occurring. The purpose of the paper is to show that the exploitation of the nonlinear properties arising from quantum nanostructure based semiconductor lasers operating under external optical feedback can lead, under specific conditions, to a bifurcation of the modulation properties. Starting from the generalized rate equations under optical feedback, the laser's modulation response is determined. Under the short external cavity assumption, calculations show that large variations of the (H-factor can contribute to improve the dynamical properties such as the relaxation frequency as well as the laser's bandwidth. On the contrary, assuming the long external cavity situation, numerical results show that even small reflections in the percent range when combined to significant variations of the (H-factor alter the laser's modulation response.

In Opt. Lett.45, 5755 (2019)OPLEDP0146-959210.1364/OL.44.005755, a factor is missing in the result of Eq. (1). Thus, the width of the comb spectrum $ \Delta \nu $Δν becomes $ \Delta \nu = 2{\sqrt 3} \Gamma {\alpha _e} $Δν=23Γα_e.

Ultrafast relaxation dynamics of photogenerated carriers in nanostructure based saturable absorber (SA) are investigated using a degenerate cross-polarized pump--probe experiment at 1.55 μm operating wavelength. Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) encased in micelles are studied and compared to bundled ones as well as to iron doped InGaAs/InP multiple quantum wells (MQW). SA parameters for all optical signal regeneration (AOSR) are extracted from the normalized differential transmission. Although all samples show the same order of recombination time, SWNT in micelles present a much higher contrast ratio associated to a lower level of saturation fluence as compared to their bundled and MQW counterparts.