Optical injection enables coherence resonance in quantum-dot lasers

Abstract

We demonstrate that optically injected semiconductor quantum-dot lasers operated in the frequency-locked regime exhibit the counterintuitive effect of coherence resonance, i.e., the regularity of noise-induced spiking is a non-monotonic function of the spontaneous emission noise, and it is optimally correlated at a non-zero value of the noise intensity. We uncover the mechanism of coherence resonance from a microscopically based model of the quantum-dot laser structure, and show that it is related to excitability under optical injection and to a saddle-node infinite period (SNIPER) bifurcation occurring for small injection strength at the border of the frequency locking regime. By a model reduction we argue that the phenomenon of coherence resonance is generic for a wide class of optically injected lasers.