Abstract
Optical injection is a key nonlinear laser configuration both for applications and fundamental studies. An important figure for understanding the optically injected laser system is the two parameter stability mapping of the dynamics found by examining the output of the injected laser under different combinations of the injection strength and detuning. We experimentally and theoretically generate this map for an optically injected quantum dot laser, biased to emit from the first excited state and optically injected near the ground state. Regions of different dynamical behaviours including phase-locking, excitability, and bursting regimes are identified. At the negatively detuned locking boundary, ground state dropouts and excited state pulses are observed near a hysteresis cycle for low injection strengths. Higher injection strengths reveal μs duration square wave trains where the intensities of the ground state and excited state operate in antiphase. A narrow region of extremely slow oscillations with periods of several tens of milliseconds is observed at the positively detuned boundary. Two competing optothermal couplings are introduced and are shown to reproduce the experimental results extremely well. In fact, the dynamics of the system are dominated by these optothermal effects and their interplay is central to reproducing detailed features of the stability map.
Highlights
Optical injection is a key technique in many modern photonic systems and unidirectional optical injection, where light from a primary laser is injected into the cavity of a secondary laser
The device under investigation is a 300 μm QD laser composed of InAs quantum dots on a GaAs
Light from the primary laser (PL) is injected into the secondary laser (SL) — the QD laser — via an optical circulator with an isolation greater than 30 dB
Summary
Optical injection is a key technique in many modern photonic systems and unidirectional optical injection, where light from a primary laser is injected into the cavity of a secondary laser. Optically injected semiconductor lasers are rich sources of fundamental non-linear dynamics, and the stability map can be used to classify regions of different behaviour including, but not limited to, excitability, multistability, oscillatory behaviour, and chaos [1,2,3] Such regions can be of interest both for fundamental studies and for applications. Injected InAs/GaAs based quantum dot (QD) lasers have attracted substantial attention in recent years They display many different dynamical regimes, including several novel regimes heretofore unobserved with other devices, such as optothermal excitability [14], and mixed mode oscillations and canard explosions [15,16]. We note a marked absence of chaos in the system
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