Generation and synchronization of wideband chaos in semiconductor lasers subject to constant-amplitude...

We propose a novel wideband chaos generation scheme by using an external-cavity semiconductor laser (ECSL) subject to optical-electronic hybrid feedback. In this scheme, the output of ECSL is photo-detected and used to modulate the output of a continuous wave laser by an electro-optical phase modulator, the constant-amplitude self-phase-modulated light is then injected back into the ECSL. The experimental results indicate that, compared with the chaos generation with conventional optical feedback (COF), significant bandwidth enhancement is achieved in the proposed scheme. The effective bandwidth of generated chaos is increased from a few GHz to over 20 GHz, and moreover, the spectrum flatness and the complexity of generated chaos are also considerably improved. Furthermore, we propose a wideband chaos synchronization system based on the proposed chaos generation scheme. It is experimentally demonstrated that high-quality synchronization between two wideband chaos signals with an effective bandwidth greater than 20 GHz is achieved. This work simultaneously achieves the generation and the synchronization of wideband chaos, which shows valuable potential in chaos-based secure communication, such as enhancing the transmission capacity and improving the security.