Microwave self-modulation of a diode laser coupled to an external cavity

An external cavity coupled to a conventional Fabry-Perot GaAs diode laser operating continuously has been found to cause modulation of the light output at a frequency within the range 0.5 to several GHz. The modulation depth is close to 100 percent and the linewidth can be made as narrow as 180 kHz. The modulation is thought to be stimulated by the intensity noise fluctuations, which peak at the well-known spiking frequency f
r
. The oscillations are strongly enhanced by a frequency locking action of the external cavity, being efficient when the external cavity round-trip time
2L/c
, or a multiple thereof, corresponds to the inverse of the spiking frequency. Since the latter is dependent on both pump current and temperature, the system can simply be tuned by adjusting the pump current. For a fixed resonator length, the narrow-band oscillations occur in a small current range, in which an increase in frequency with increasing current at a rate of 400 kHz/mA is observed. A small-signal analysis based on simple rate equations shows the influence of the external cavity on the intrinsic resonance frequency f
r
. It demonstrates that self-modulation can only occur for small values of the coupling coefficient ε between the laser diode and the external cavity.