Abstract

Actively mode-locked laser diodes (LDs) with an external mirror configuration suffer from trailing pulses which is caused by the residual reflection at an LD facet even with an antireflection coaling. When the cavity length is relatively long (~ few GHz) and the bias and RF currents are large, we also observe trailing pulses caused by an excess gain. We proposed recently a new method for obtaining high-power short optical pulses without such trailing pulses[1]. A part of the output is reflected back into the LD with an orthogonal polarization and an appropriate time delay. Trailing pulses caused both by the excess gain and the residual reflection at an LD facet are suppressed.

© 1996 IEEE