Weak injection locked DFB semiconductor laser for optical fiber sensing

Abstract

Two DFB semiconductor lasers are adopted as master and slave lasers to investigate the properties of the weak injection locked DFB laser, such as the stable locking range, the phase noise and the power stability. A Brillouin/erbium fiber laser pumped by the master DFB laser is injected into the slave DFB laser to validate the improvements of power stability and spectral purity through the laser injection locking technology, which also demonstrates the feasibility of single frequency extraction. The locked laser acts like a tunable narrow-band optical filter with central frequency and bandwidth decided by the input signal. The experimental results give rise to some potential configurations useful for Brillouin distributed fiber sensing and signal processing in microwave photonics.