Dynamic characteristics of bistable laser diodes

A stability analysis of bistable laser diodes, which gives a first analytical explanation of the recently observed high-speed bistable switching and self-pulsation, is presented by introducing two key parameters. It is shown that switching and self-pulsation are associated with two time scales. Turn-on and turn-off dynamics can be characterized by two different sets of eigenvalues which are used to analytically explain the switch-off and switch-on transients observed in experiments. It is also shown that the gain function profile can significantly affect the performance of self-pulsation operation of bistable laser diodes. The analysis also proves that the existence of two critical points has an important effect on the switching time if switching occurs around one of them. The results of the present analysis agree well with those of an exact numerical simulation. In addition, the analysis can be applied to study dynamic characteristics of a bistable laser diode (BLD) with other more complicated structures such as distributed feedback (DFB) laser diodes, multiquantum-well (MQW) laser diodes, etc.