RF injection locked 18 GHz regeneratively mode-locked semiconductor laser

In this manuscript, a semiconductor based fiber ring cavity mode-locked laser regeneratively driven at 18 GHz is presented. The optical spectrum of the laser is centered at 1578 nm. The laser is RF injection locked via an external source at 18 GHz. The phase noise of the mode-locked laser is measured and the integrated timing jitter was found to be 10.8 fs (from 100 Hz to 20 MHz) and 13.3 fs (from 100 Hz to Nyquist frequency). The integrated amplitude fluctuation (from 100 Hz to 20 MHz) was less than 0.02%. The laser phase and amplitude noise responses to various injected RF power levels were also investigated. The injection RF power has significant effect on the phase noise and the best jitter value is around 40 dB lower than the cavity regenerated RF power.