Measurement of ultrafast cross-gain saturation dynamics of a semiconductor optical amplifier using two-color pump-probe technique

The gain dynamics of a multiple-quantum-well semiconductor optical amplifier with wide gain-bandwidth are measured by a two-color pump-probe technique using optical pulses with a pulse duration on the order of 100 fs. The short optical pulses are generated by selecting narrow spectral components from compressed supercontinuum optical pulses using optical filters.