Low jittered optical pulse generation from a gain-switched single-mode VCSEL with an external laser beam injection

Abstract

We report experimental results on timing-jitter suppressed optical short pulse generation from a gain-switched single-mode vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) at 1.55 µm wavelength with an external laser beam injection. The low timing-jittered optical short pulses are very useful for high-speed optical time-division-multiplexed (TDM) communications and signal processing. The obtained timing jitter and pulse duration from the VCSEL were less than 1 ps and 65 ps, respectively, at a pulse repetition rate of 1.6 GHz.