Erbium-doped laser with multi-segmented silicon nitride structure

Optical Fiber Communication Conference 2014 San Francisco, California United States 9–13 March 2014 ISBN: 978-1-55752-993-0 From the session: Novel Optical Schemes (W4E)This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.We report on DFB and DBR lasers formed from a wavelength insensitive multisegmented silicon nitride waveguide. Using a five-segment waveguide, we obtain lasing in erbium-doped DBR (-3.6 dBm) and DFB (-7.3 dBm) cavities. © OSA 2014

Femtosecond laser pumped by high-brightness coherent polarization locked diodes

We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, the use of a coherent polarization locked diode as the high-brightness pump source for a femtosecond laser. Four diode emitters are coherently locked to produce more than 5 W linearly polarized, narrow linewidth, and single-lobed pump beam. This gives >10× brightness improvement over the conventional diode array. The diode beam is then used to pump a Yb:KYW laser to obtain 2 W output with 57% slope efficiency in cw laser operation. By using a saturable absorber mirror, we achieved cw mode-locking operation with a 177 fs pulse width at an average power of 0.55 W

Coherent polarization locking of multimode beams in a diode bar

We demonstrate coherent polarization locking of multimode beams from four broad area emitters in a diode bar. The beams are overlapped into single output by using walk-off crystals and waveplates while their phases are locked via polarization discrimination. Coherent locking of multimode beams enabled power scaling of coherent diode output while retaining beam quality of single emitter. We obtained power of 7.2 W with M2 of 1.5 x 11.5 from a 980 nm diode laser. This corresponds to brightness improvement of more than an order of magnitude.Accepted versio

High power coherent polarization locked laser diode

We have coherently combined a broad area laser diode array to obtain high power single-lobed output by using coherent polarization locking. The single-lobed coherent beam is achieved by spatially combining four diode emitters using walk-off crystals and waveplates while their phases are passively locked via polarization discrimination. While our previous work focused on coherent polarization locking of diode in Gaussian beams, we demonstrate in this paper, the feasibility of the same polarization discrimination for locking multimode beams from broad area diode lasers. The resonator is designed to mitigate the loss from smile effect by using retro-reflection feedback in the cavity. In a 980 nm diode array, we produced 7.2 W coherent output with M2 of 1.5 x 11.5. The brightness of the diode is improved by more than an order of magnitude

Monolithically-integrated distributed feedback laser compatible with CMOS processing

© 2017 Optical Society of America. An optically-pumped, integrated distributed feedback laser is demonstrated using a CMOS compatible process, where a record-low-temperature deposited gain medium enables integration with active devices such as modulators and detectors. A pump threshold of 24.9 mW and a slope efficiency of 1.3 % is demonstrated at the lasing wavelength of 1552.98 nm. The rare-earth-doped aluminum oxide, used as the gain medium in this laser, is deposited by a substrate-bias-assisted reactive sputtering process. This process yields optical quality films with 0.1 dB/cm background loss at the deposition temperature of 250 ◦C, and therefore is fully compatible as a back-end-of-line CMOS process. The aforementioned laser’s performance is comparable to previous lasers having gain media fabricated at much higher temperatures (> 550 ◦C). This work marks a crucial step towards monolithic integration of amplifiers and lasers in silicon microphotonic systems

High-power thulium lasers on a silicon photonics platform.

Mid-infrared laser sources are of great interest for various applications, including light detection and ranging, spectroscopy, communication, trace-gas detection, and medical sensing. Silicon photonics is a promising platform that enables these applications to be integrated on a single chip with low cost and compact size. Silicon-based high-power lasers have been demonstrated at 1.55 μm wavelength, while in the 2 μm region, to the best of our knowledge, high-power, high-efficiency, and monolithic light sources have been minimally investigated. In this Letter, we report on high-power CMOS-compatible thulium-doped distributed feedback and distributed Bragg reflector lasers with single-mode output powers up to 267 and 387 mW, and slope efficiencies of 14% and 23%, respectively. More than 70 dB side-mode suppression ratio is achieved for both lasers. This work extends the applicability of silicon photonic microsystems in the 2 μm region

High-power thulium lasers on a silicon photonics platform

Mid-infrared laser sources are of great interest for various applications, including light detection and ranging, spectroscopy, communication, trace-gas detection, and medical sensing. Silicon photonics is a promising platform that enables these applications to be integrated on a single chip with low cost and compact size. Silicon-based high-power lasers have been demonstrated at 1.55 μm wavelength, while in the 2 μm region, to the best of our knowledge, high-power, high-efficiency, and monolithic light sources have been minimally investigated. In this Letter, we report on high-power CMOS-compatible thulium-doped distributed feedback and distributed Bragg reflector lasers with single-mode output powers up to 267 and 387 mW, and slope efficiencies of 14% and 23%, respectively. More than 70 dB side-mode suppression ratio is achieved for both lasers. This work extends the applicability of silicon photonic microsystems in the 2 μm region

High-power CMOS-compatible photonic integrated thulium-doped distributed feedback laser

We report a high power CMOS-compatible thulium-doped distributed feedback laser with single-mode output power up to 267 mW, 14% slope efficiency, and >70dB side mode suppression ratio