Abstract

Being excited in the band edge spectral region many semiconductors (such as III-V) demonstrate a competition between electronic and thermal nonlinearities giving the opposite sign contributions to the refractive index of a material. Such a competition gives rise to an oscillatory instability,^1,2 which can result in complex dynamic behaviour of semiconductor etalons^3-5 including a monostable neuronlike pulse repsonse (PR) to external perturbations. Depending on operating conditions "light" and "dark" PR have been predicted⁴ corresponding to switch-on and switch-off of an etalon internal irradiance. The "light" PR have been experimentally registered for an InSb etalon.⁵ Here we report the experimental results on a generation of "dark" pulses and an evolution of the monostable response with the variation of operating conditions. Also the results are presented on locking of regenerative oscillations (RO) to external signals.

© 1994 IEEE