Chaotic characteristics of output light from semiconductor laser with self-chaotic phase modulation and optical feedback

Abstract

<sec>Distributed feedback semiconductor lasers (DFB-SLs) are the class B lasers, and would output chaotic laser under the external disturbances, such as external optical feedback and optical injection. Chaotic laser are widely used in many fields, including optical fiber sensing, chaotic laser secure communication, and better entropy sources for generating high-speed random number. However, the chaotic laser outputted from the semiconductor lasers with external cavity optical feedback produces a time delay signature (TDS) , which limits the applications of chaotic laser. On the other hand, the bandwidth (BW) of chaotic carrier signal plays the important role in determining the transmission rate of information signal. Therefore, the TDS and BW are two important parameters that will affect chaotic laser’s applications, and they are usually used to describe the chaos characteristics of chaotic laser.</sec><sec>In this paper, we present a new scheme used to describe the TDS and investigate the BW of chaotic laser from semiconductor laser. For this scheme, the output laser from a DFB-SL with external single optical feedback is injected in double ways into another DFB-SL with phase modulation optical feedback by self chaos light. Thus they form a semiconductor laser system with external double optical injection and phase modulation optical feedback by self chaos light (SL-EDOI-PMOFBSCL). We investigate numerically the influences of the system parameters on TDS, such as the injection coefficient and feedback coefficient. Then the suppression effects on TDS are contrasted and analyzed with two other systems, that is to say, the semiconductor laser with external double optical injection and optical feedback (SL-EDOI-OF) and the semiconductor laser with external single optical injection and phase modulation optical feedback by self chaos light (SL-ESOI-PMOFBSCL). The results indicate that the proposed scheme in this work has the better suppression effect on TDS. Then the BW of the chaotic laser is investigated under the parameters conditions of effectively suppressing TDS. The simulation results show that the scheme proposed in this work can enhance the BW of chaotic laser by appropriately selecting the parametric values, and the maximum BW value of the obtained chaotic laser reaches about 16 GHz.</sec>