Dynamics of passive FM locking in semiconductor lasers

In earlier work [1] the role of gain nonlinearities in effecting self-locked FM supermode oscillation in semiconductor lasers was established and the requisite gain saturation and multiwave mixing nonlinearities were shown to be consistent with the experimental observations of Tiemeijer et al [2]. A three-mode laser model is sufficient to demonstrate the occurrence of intrinsic FM locking in semiconductor lasers but, in order, for example, to calculate the depth of FM modulation in the self-locked state a multimode model is required. In the present work the model of [1] has been extended to take more than three modes into account.