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Semiconductor laser linewidth theory revisited
More and more applications require semiconductor lasers distinguished not only by large modulation bandwidths or high output powers, but also by small spectral linewidths. The theoretical understanding of the root causes limiting the linewidth is therefore of great practical relevance. In this paper, we derive a general expression for the calculation of the spectral linewidth step by step in a self-contained manner. We build on the linewidth theory developed in the 1980s and 1990s but look from a modern perspective, in the sense that we choose as our starting points the time-dependent coupled-wave equations for the forward and backward propagating fields and an expansion of the fields in terms of the stationary longitudinal modes of the open cavity. As a result, we obtain rather general expressions for the longitudinal excess factor of spontaneous emission (K-factor) and the effective α-factor including the effects of nonlinear gain (gain compression) and refractive index (Kerr effect), gain dispersion, and longitudinal spatial hole burning in multi-section cavity structures. The effect of linewidth narrowing due to feedback from an external cavity often described by the so-called chirp reduction factor is also automatically included. We propose a new analytical formula for the dependence of the spontaneous emission on the carrier density avoiding the use of the population inversion factor. The presented theoretical framework is applied to a numerical study of a two-section distributed Bragg reflector laser.
Modeling and efficient simulations of broad-area edge-emitting semiconductor lasers and amplifiers
We present a (2+1)-dimensional partial differential equation model for spatial-lateral dynamics of edge-emitting broad-area semiconductor devices and several extensions of this model describing different physical effects. MPI-based parallelization of the resulting middlesize numerical problem is implemented and tested on the blade cluster and separate multi-core computers at the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin. It was found, that an application of 25-30 parallel processes on all considered platforms was guaranteeing a nearly optimal performance of the algorithm with the speedup around 20-25 and the efficiency of 0.7-0.8. It was also shown, that a simultaneous usage of several in-house available multi-core computers allows a further increase of the speedup without a significant loss of the efficiency. Finally, an importance of the considered problem and the efficient numerical simulations of this problem were illustrated by a few examples occurring in real world applications.
External cavity modes in Lang-Kobayashi and traveling wave models
We investigate a semiconductor laser with delayed optical feedback due to an external cavity formed by a regular mirror. We discuss similarities and differences of the well-known Lang--Kobayashi delay differential equation model and the traveling wave partial differential equation model. For comparison we locate the continuous wave states in both models and analyze their stability.
Traveling wave modeling of nonlinear dynamics in multisection semiconductor lasers
A hierarchy of 1 (time) + 1 (space) dimensional first-order partial differential equation (traveling wave) models is used for a description of dynamics in individual semiconductor lasers, various multisection semiconductor lasers, and coupled laser systems. Consequent modifications of the basic traveling wave model allow for taking into account different physical effects such as the gain dispersion, the thermal detuning, the spatial hole burning of carriers, the nonlinear gain saturation, or various carrier exchange processes in quantum dot lasers. For illustration, the model was applied for simulations of dynamics in complex ring laser with four branches of filtered feedback. Finally, several advanced techniques for model analysis such as calculation of instantaneous optical modes, finding of steady states, and numerical continuation and bifurcation analysis of the model equations were discussed and illustrated by example simulations.