Linewidth reduction of a semiconductor laser by electrical feedback

Abstract

An electrical feedback technique was proposed to stably reduce the linewidth of a semiconductor laser without changing its cavity structure. Calculations and experiments were carried out to reduce the linewidth of a 1.5 μm InGaAsP laser (DFB type) according to the following procedure. A compact Fabry-Perot interferometer was used as a freqeuncy discriminator. The minimum attainable linewidth, limited by the detector noise, was estimated as being narrower than 1 kHz when the reflectance of the interferometer used was higher than 0.9. The minimum linewidth obtained in the experiment was 330 kHz, which was 15 times as narrow as in the case of a free-running laser. The improvements of this experimental result can be expected by simultaneously reducing the AM noise of the laser.