Injection-locking criteria for simultaneously locking single-mode lasers to optical frequency combs from gain-switched lasers

Abstract

Optical sources for the forthcoming terabit/s era of optical communications and networking will require multiple frequency-locked carriers, each with low phase noise, in order to minimize the spectral occupancy of the overall channel bandwidth. One method to construct a highly reconfigurable version of such a source is to use an optical frequency comb from a gain-switched laser to simultaneously injection-lock many different single mode lasers. The outputs from the single-mode lasers are all mutually frequency locked and possess the same low-phase noise properties of the gainswitched comb. In this submission, we present numerical simulation results from the entire system of simultaneously injection-locked single mode lasers by firstly simulating an optical frequency comb from the gain-switched laser and then using that frequency comb to injection lock the single-mode lasers. The simulation approach is to use lumped rate equations with the appropriate stochastic Langevin terms for spontaneous carrier recombination and for spontaneous emission. The inclusion of the stochastic terms are vital when identifying the locked states of the entire system. Using the simulator we are able to identify important criteria to maximize the frequency locking range that suppresses the cross talk from adjacent comb lines to greater than 30 dB, and avoiding the carrier-photon resonance of the single mode lasers is vital to achieve this. The relative simplicity of the simulator has the advantage of being exploited within optical communication simulators to predict the communication system performance when using these sources, which would be of advantage to designers of such systems.