Abstract
Recent advances in low-reflectivity coatings have made it possible to construct semiconductor laser amplifiers whose behavior approximates that of a traveling wave amplifier.1–3 At low bias currents (around twice the threshold of the device before coating) and low input powers (<10 dBm) these devices have large dynamic bandwidths of over 50 GHz.4 At high bias currents (around three times the original threshold), the bandwidth Is found to be limited by the bandwidth of the residual Fabry-Perot cavity modes. We investigated how gain saturation due to high-input powers affects the dynamic bandwidth of one of these amplifiers. For an input consisting of narrow (<70-ps FWHM) pulses with no appreciable chirp, pulse broadening was observed. However, for an input consisting of broader chirped pulses (130-ps FWHM), pulse compression of up to 70 ps was observed for input powers greater than −10 dBm (i.e., sufficiently high to significantly saturate the amplifier gain) and less than 0 dBm. At higher input powers these pulses were also broadened. A similar pulse compression by an amplifier, on a much smaller scale, was recently reported by Chang and Vukusic5 for an input consisting of narrow chirped pulses from a mode-locked semiconductor laser.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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