Abstract

The control of the quantum state of light has recently been studied extensively, aiming at the achievement of ultra-low noise below the shot noise limit. Several experiments showed that amplitude squeezing could be achieved in constant-current-driven semiconductor lasers. However, the generation of amplitude-squeezed light from distributed feedback semiconductor lasers (DFB) has been up to now considerably less successful than that from Fabry-Perot devices. Simulations indicate that DFB structures with high coupling coefficient length product kL are unlikely to be good sources of squeezed light, because of the evanescence of the optical fields along the grating [1]. They also show, that for low kL values the lowest achievable intensity noise depends on the structure of the laser diode and can be higher than expected from the laser quantum efficiency alone.

© 1998 IEEE