Observation of the synchronization of chaos in mutually injected vertical-cavity surface-emitting semiconductor lasers

Abstract

Synchronization of chaotic oscillations was observed in mutually injected vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) in a low-frequency fluctuation regime. In the experiments, only one of the two polarization modes (x mode) showed synchronized oscillations, and the other polarization components (y mode) were synchronized as a result of the effect of anticorrelated oscillations that is a characteristic feature of VCSELs.

Complex photonics: Dynamics and applications of delay-coupled semiconductors lasers

“…The theoretical description might in some cases require different or adapted modeling to account for a second polarization mode or for the different gain concepts, but the observed phenomena are similar. Delayed-feedback instabilities have also been found and characterized in detail for VCSEL; see, e.g., Jiang, Dagenais, andMorgan (1995), Fujiwara, Takiguchi, andOhtsubo (2003), Sondermann and Ackemann (2005), and Tabaka et al (2006)). Although VCSEL were initially speculated to be less sensitive to external reflections due to their high reflecting mirrors, it turned out that their sensitivity to delayed feedback is similar to edge-emitting lasers, since their photon lifetimes T p are comparable.…”

“…18 is that the correlation coefficient corresponding to the isochronal identical synchronization is very small, in both the experiment and the simulations. The reason for its small value is that the solution, although existing, is unstable, as demonstrated both numerically and analytically (White, Matus, and Moloney, 2002;D'Huys et al, 2010;Englert et al, 2010;Flunkert et al, 2010). The correlation coefficient is not zero (or close to zero) at zero lag because the lasers were biased at threshold, operating in the LFF regime with the characteristic dropouts in the optical power (see Fig.…”

“…Identical synchronization can occur if ¼ þ 0 . Identical synchronization is also possible for certain values of < þ 0 due to interference (Flunkert and Schöll, 2012) but otherwise, generalized synchronization or no synchronization is observed.…”

“…In particular, it was found both experimentally and numerically that when two identical semiconductor lasers (with respect to internal parameters and operating conditions) are placed far apart and coupled face to face via their emitted electric fields, subnanosecond, couplinginduced synchronized chaotic dynamics in conjunction with a spontaneous symmetry breaking can occur (Fujino and Ohtsubo, 2001;Heil, Fischer, Elsäßer, Mulet, and Mirasso, 2001;Mulet et al, 2004). The chaotic oscillations are accompanied by a leader-laggard dynamics in which the leader-laggard role of the two lasers changes randomly with time; over a long time window, both lasers lead or lag, on average, for the same time.…”

Mutual optical injection in coupled DBR laser pairs

“…Hence, 1/τ is significantly less than ω RO and these systems may be described as being in the long coupling regime. Such studies have yielded observations of localised and chaos synchronisation in edge-emitting lasers (EELS) [16,17], vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELS) [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and phase-locking in quantum dot (QD) lasers [25]. Studies of coupled distributed feedback (DFB) lasers in the short coupling regime (τ = 170 ps) have also been undertaken [26,27].…”