Optical Feedback in Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers

Abstract

International audienceVertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are as sensitive to optical feedback (OF) as edge-emitting lasers as their much higher mirror reflectivity is compensated by the much smaller intracavity round-trip time resulting in a similar OF rate. VCSELs may emit light in multiple transverse modes and may exhibit polarization bistability which adds new features to their behavior when subject to OF. We present a survey on experimental and modeling results for three regimes of OF in VCSELs: long, short, and extremely short external cavities (ECs). We show that for long and short ECs, the Lang-Kobayashi model is in good agreement with experiments on OF-induced polarization switching, mode hopping, and antiphase oscillatory dynamics at the delay time. These last dynamics modify polarization residence-time distribution making it oscillatory. We demonstrate numerically and experimentally coherence resonance in such bistable, time-delayed optical system. We present results on low-frequency fluctuation and pulse-package dynamics in VCSELs and discuss the role of light polarization. We discuss polarization rotating OF for generating high-frequency pulses as a result of EC mode beating. Finally, we demonstrate how OF from extremely short EC can strongly modify VCSEL characteristics and can be used to effectively control their polarization properties by subwavelength changes of the EC length

Bifurcation structure of cavity soliton dynamics in a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser with a saturable absorber and time-delayed feedback

“…Delayed optical feedback is known to strongly modify the dynamical behavior of semiconductor lasers leading to external cavity mode hopping, periodic or aperiodic dynamics and even coherence collapse [32,33]. Optical feedback impacts the VCSEL's modal properties and dynamics in quite the same way as those of traditional edge-emitting semiconductor lasers [34,35] with the additional peculiarity of introducing polarization switching and two-polarization mode dynamics [36][37][38]. Recently, first studies of CS behavior in optically injected broad-area VCSELs subjected to time-delayed optical feedback have appeared [29][30][31]39].…”

Experimental Phase-Space Tomography of Semiconductor Laser Dynamics

“…We demonstrate our phase-space tomography on the complex trajectories of a paradigmatic dynamical state, namely, low frequency fluctuations (LFFs) [14,[18][19][20], a state exhibiting dynamics over multiple time scales. Globally, LFFs are characterized by slow envelope dynamics in all three physical phase-space dimensions.…”

Delay-induced depinning of localized structures in a spatially inhomogeneous Swift-Hohenberg model

“…Since the experimental evidence of cavity solitons in semiconductor cavities [16][17][18][19][20], they have attracted growing interest in the nonlinear optics community due to potential applications for e.g., all-optical delay lines or logic gates [21,22]. Recently, much attention was paid to the investigation of the influence of delayed optical feedback on the stability properties of these structures [23][24][25][26]. Delayed feedback control is a well-established technique that has been applied to various nonlinear systems (see, e.g., [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] and references thereafter).…”