Abstract

There has recently been considerable interest in ultrashort optical pulse generation with semiconductor diode lasers for high bit-rate optical communication and fast data processing. We have demonstrated, we believe for the first time, that a train of short optical pulses (~30 psec) can be generated by applying a large sinusoidal signal at subgigahertz frequency to the semiconductor diode laser with relatively low dc bias.¹ We report further results of an experimental study of short optical pulses from the rf-modulated AlGaAs DH diode laser with the theoretical analysis, which explains fairly well the experimental results.

© 1981 Optical Society of America