Effect of Inhomogeneous Broadening on Gain and Phase Recovery of Quantum-Dot Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Abstract

We numerically investigate the effect of inhomogeneous broadening caused by quantum-dot (QD) size fluctuations on the gain and phase recovery of QD semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). We establish 1088 coupled rate equations to simulate the carrier dynamics of the inhomogeneously broadened QD ensembles as inhomogeneous broadening increases. When all the QD ensembles are identical and inhomogeneous broadening becomes zero, eight coupled rate equations are solved for the homogeneous QDs. The gain and phase recovery responses are calculated when an ultrashort pump pulse is injected into a QD SOA. As the inhomogeneous broadening increases, the slow component of the phase recovery at the QD ground state increases due to the enlarged contribution from the slow phase recovery of carrier reservoirs such as the QD excited states. By separately calculating the gain and phase recovery responses of the homogeneous QDs with different sizes, we identify how increasing inhomogeneous broadening affects the enlarged slow phase recovery components from carrier reservoirs. We also demonstrate that the effect of inhomogeneous broadening on the temporal variation of the α-factor is more significant compared to the injection pump power.