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This Letter presents a method for the fast and broad wavelength sweeping of a standard setup of a diode's active region and its immediate vicinity, which contain the diode's optical feedback system. The selective and rapid heating of the active region is possible due to the confinement of the voltage drop to the active diode's region that has submicrometer thickness. Using the presented method and an off-the-shelf telecommunication distributed feedback laser diode, we demonstrate wavelength sweeps in excess of 10 nm that were completed in about 200 ns, while generating average optical power in excess of 50 mW. In spite of high-amplitude current-drive pulses, 6000 h continuous operation of the diode within such an operational regime did not show any significant degradation of the diode's performance.

This paper presents a frequency-modulated optical signal generator in the THz band. The proposed method is based on a fast optical frequency sweep of a single narrowband laser diode used together with an optical fiber interferometer. The optical frequency sweep using a single laser diode is achieved by generating short current pulses with a high amplitude, which are driving the laser diode. Theoretical analysis showed that the modulation frequency could be changed by the optical path difference of the interferometer or optical frequency sweep rate of a laser diode. The efficiency of the optical signal generator with Michelson and Fabry–Perot interferometers is theoretically analyzed and experimentally evaluated for three different scenarios. Interferometers with different optical path differences and a fixed optical frequency sweep rate were used in the first scenario. Different optical frequency sweep rates and fixed optical path differences of the interferometers were used in the second scenario. This paper presents a method for optical chirp generation using a programmable current pulse waveform, which drives a laser diode to achieve nonlinear optical sweep with a fixed optical path difference of the interferometer. The experimental results showed that the proposed signals could be generated within a microwave (1–30 GHz) and THz band (0.1–0.3 THz).

This paper presents a method for gas concentration determination based on the measurement of the refractive index dispersion of a gas near the gas resonance in the near-infrared region (NIR). The gas refractive index dispersion line shape is reconstructed from the variation in the spectral interference fringes’ periods, which are generated by a low-finesse Fabry-Perot interferometer during the DFB diode’s linear-over-time optical frequency sweep around the gas resonance frequency. The entire sensing system was modeled and then verified experimentally, for an example of a low concentration methane-air mixture. We demonstrate experimentally a refractive index dispersion measurement resolution of 2 × 10−9 refractive index units (RIU), which corresponds to a change in methane concentration in air of 0.04 vol% at the resonant frequency of 181.285 THz (1653.7 nm). The experimental and modeling results show an excellent agreement. The presented system utilizes a very simple optical design and has good potential for the realization of cost-efficient gas sensors that can be operated remotely through standard telecom optical fibers.

This paper presents a spectrally-resolved integration system suitable for the reading of Bragg grating, all-fiber Fabry-Perot, and similar spectrally-resolved fiber-optic sensors. This system is based on a standard telecommunication dense wavelength division multiplexing transmission module that contains a distributed feedback laser diode and a wavelength locker. Besides the transmission module, only a few additional opto-electronic components were needed to build an experimental interrogation system that demonstrated over a 2 nm wide wavelength interrogation range, and a 1 pm wavelength resolution. When the system was combined with a typical Bragg grating sensor, a strain resolution of 1 με and temperature resolution of 0.1 °C were demonstrated experimentally. The proposed interrogation system relies entirely on Telecordia standard compliant photonic components and can thus be straightforwardly qualified for use within the range of demanding applications.