Engineering Commons^™

Deriving Of Single Intensive Picosecond Optical Pulses From A High-Power Gain-Switched Laser Diode By Spectral Filtering, S. N. Vainshtein, Grigory Simin, J. T. Kostamovaara

Faculty Publications

Single 25 ps/16 W optical pulses were achieved by spectral filtering from a multiheterostructure gain-switched laser diode with its quasisteady-state modes suppressed by a factor of 10³ as compared with the peak power. A significant transient spectrum broadening makes this possible provided that a very high dI/dt rate of the pumping current pulse is used. A simple numerical model is suggested which describes adequately both the spectral and transient features of the observed phenomenon. It follows from the model that single picosecond optical pulses can be obtained from any type of high power semiconductor laser.