Infrared and Laser Engineering, Vol. 49, Issue 12, 20201066 (2020)

Progress in photonic integrated chaotic semiconductor laser (Invited)

Abstract

Chaotic laser has been widely applied in the fields of secure optical communication, random number generation, chaotic lidar, chaotic optical time domain reflector and distributed optical fiber sensing due to its characteristics of wide-spectrum, noise-like, low-coherence and so on. Photonic integrated chaotic semiconductor laser is a kind of chaotic laser which is small in size, stable and low-cost. The progress of photonic integrated chaotic semiconductor laser and its main applications in recent ten years were reviewed. Firstly, the photonic integrated methods of chaotic semiconductor laser were introduced. Then, the classification of photonic integrated chaotic semiconductor lasers was demonstrated. According to the perturbation mode, the external cavity structures including straight cavity, multiple-cavity, ring cavity, two-dimensional cavity and mutual injection were discussed. The advantages and characteristics of these devices were compared. Furthermore, the applications of photonic integrated chaotic semiconductor lasers in optical time domain reflectometer, secure optical communication and random number generation were introduced. Finally, the key integration techniques, time delay signature and intermittent chaos in photonic integrated chaotic laser were discussed.

keywords

• chaotic semiconductor laser
• mutual injection
• optical feedback
• photonic integration