Timing jitter of passively mode-locked semiconductor lasers subject to optical feedback : a semi-analytic approach

Abstract

We propose a semi-analytical method of calculating the timing fluctuations in modelocked semiconductor lasers and apply it to study the effect of delayed coherent optical feedback on pulse timing jitter in these lasers. The proposed method greatly reduces computation times and therefore allows for the investigation of the dependence of timing fluctuations over greater parameter domains. We show that resonant feedback leads to a reduction in the timing jitter and that a frequency-pulling region forms about the main resonances, within which a timing jitter reduction is observed. The width of these requency pulling regions increases linearly with short feedback delay times. We derive an analytic expression for the timing jitter, which predicts a monotonic decrease in the timing jitter for resonant feedback of increasing delay lengths, when timing jitter effects are fully separated from amplitude jitter effects. For long feedback cavities the decrease in timing jitter scales approximately as 1/tau with the increase of the feedback delay time tau.