Aluminum nitride photonics for high-speed electro-optical tuning of self-injection-locked laser

Integrated lasers play an essential role in diverse fields such as communication, sensing, and metrology. Self-injection locking provides an attractive route to create highly coherent chip-integrated lasers, but their long-term stability cannot be guaranteed without laser frequency locking, which requires fast laser frequency tuning. Here, we demonstrate an electro-optically tunable hybrid laser at 780 nm wavelength, based on aluminum nitride (AlN) integrated photonics. Leveraging the low-loss characteristics of AlN at short wavelengths and its electro-optic Pockels effect, the AlN hybrid laser enables single-wavelength lasing and fast frequency tuning at the same time. The laser exhibits 1 GHz modulation bandwidth, with 220 MHz/V modulation efficiency. This result demonstrates the potential of an integrated narrow linewidth laser on an AlN platform for applications that require fast laser tuning.