Chaotic emission and tunable self-sustained pulsations in a two-section Fabry–Perot quantum dot laser

Abstract

We present an experimental study on the intrinsic instabilities of a two electrode InAs/InGaAs Fabry–Perot quantum dot laser in the absence of optical feedback. By individually controlling the current injected in each electrode, different regimes of operation are allowed including tunable self-sustained pulsations and coherence collapse resulting to possible chaotic emission. The origin of these effects does not resign in the presence of optical feedback but is associated to the carrier dynamics of the quantum dot device. A numerical analysis on the time traces collected from the device reveals high complexity output in terms of correlation dimension.