Backscattering Effects on High-Speed Modulation of Strongly Injection-Locked Whistle-Geometry Semiconductor Ring Lasers

Abstract

An injection-locking scheme, involving a single-frequency master laser monolithically integrated with a unidirectional whistle-geometry semiconductor microring laser, has been proposed for enhanced ultra-high-speed performance. Greatly enhanced high-speed modulation performance of the strong-injection-locking scheme has been predicted in numerical calculations. In our previous analysis, however, linear coupling between the two counter-propagating modes due to light backscattering was not taken into account. In this work, we investigate the potential negative impact of light backscattering between the two counter-propagating modes on high-speed modulation performance of strongly injection-locked unidirectional whistle-geometry semiconductor microring lasers.

Keywords

• Direct modulation
• light backscattering
• modu- lation response
• monolithic integration
• optical injection locking
• semiconductor ring lasers