Effect of saturable absorption on the performance of a 40 GHz optical clock recovered from a monolithic semiconductor laser

The effect of a saturable absorber (SA) on the performance of 40 GHz optical clock signal recovered from a monolithic semiconductor laser is investigated, in terms of timing jitter, locking range, and extinction ratio. Experiments show that using a SA improves the extinction ratio but reduces the locking range and increases sensitivity to the data mark ratio.