A scheme for realizing a photon number amplifier by use of a high-quantum-efficiency photodetector and a number-state semiconductor laser is analyzed. It is found that the photon number amplifier is not significantly limited by the electronic amplifier noise or by the laser quantum efficiency for input states that are nearly classical.

Generation of millimeter-wave electronic signals and power is required for highfrequency communication links, RADAR, remote sensing and other applications. However, in the 30 to 300 GHz mm-wave regime, signal sources are bulky and inefficient. All-optical generation of mm-wave signals promises to improve efficiency to as much as 30 to 50 percent with output power as high as 100 mW. All of this ...

Semiconductor laser amplifiers have been subject of great interest for several years now. Travelling wave semiconductor laser amplifiers have recently been implemented in optical fibre communication systems as optical repeaters and optical preamplifiers. Automatic gain control (AGC) of laser amplifiers is required in more reliable optical communication systems to compensate for the effect relat...

We report phase-conjugate feedback into a fluorozirconate optical fiber amplifier at infrared wavelengths. By using a semiconductor laser diode at 807 nm, a grating is established in photorefractive BaTiO(3) that, in the ring configuration, provides feedback into the amplifier necessary for laser action. Once written, the grating is self-sustaining, and lasing is observed even after the laser d...

We demonstrate a high-speed tunable, continuous wave laser source for Fourier domain OCT. The laser source is based on a fiber coupled, semiconductor optical amplifier and a tunable ultrahigh finesse, fiber Fabry Perot filter for frequency tuning. The light source provides frequency scan rates of up to 20,000 sweeps per second over a wavelength range of >70 nm FWHM at 1330 nm, yielding an axial...

λ2 OC-192 We are manufacturing widely tunable laser diodes based on an integrated single chip design. The sampled-grating distributed Bragg reflector (SG-DBR) laser is monolithically integrated with a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The continuous wave (cw) output power of the fully packaged device is more than 20mW over the entire C-band with low noise figures and a high side-mode suppr...

The optical gain-depletion-induced mode-locking dynamics of a semiconductor optical-amplifier-based fiber ring laser (SOAFL) backward injected by a purely sinusoidally modulated or digitally encoded distributedfeedback laser diode are theoretically and experimentally demonstrated. The effect of gain depletion and waveform on the mode-locked pulse width, pulse shape, and power of the SOAFL are i...

The characteristics of a semiconductor laser operating in the threshold region are investigated systematically. In this transition region from below to above threshold, the linewidth versus injection current characteristic is found to be nonmonotonic: a local minimum of linewidth just below threshold and a local maximum just above threshold are confirmed experimentally. If a semiconductor laser...

Abstract A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor system using a fiber ring laser with a hybrid amplifier is proposed and demonstrated. The hybrid amplifier comprises an erbium doped waveguide amplifier and a semiconductor optical amplifier. The experiment shows that such the hybrid amplifier has a high amplifier spontaneous emission power and gain spectrum. Moreover, this fiber ring laser can provid...

Diode lasers have many benefits, but it is very hard to make diode lasers that have both high spectral purity and high intensity. In this masters thesis a diode laser amplifier with a gain of G=4 is constructed. The amplifier is a double-pass semiconductor laser amplifier and the active region is 100 ~m broad. The amplifier is operated at 793 nm using an external cavity diode laser as master la...