Avionics, Fiber-Optics and Photonics Conference (AVFOP 2012)
11 - 13 September 2012
High-Power, Compact Slab-Coupled Optical Waveguide(SCOW) Emitters and their Applications
Paul Juodawlkis
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, USA
Abstract
For the past decade, we have been developing a new class of high-power semiconductor optical gain medium referred to as the slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier (SCOWA). The key attributes of the SCOWA that differentiate it from previously reported semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are: (i) a large (> 5 x 5 µm), symmetric, fundamental transverse optical mode that is realized via a combination of low index-contrast and slab-coupled mode filtering, (ii) very small optical confinement factor (Γ~ 0.003-0.01) that enables Watt-level saturation output power, and (iii) very small internal optical loss (αi ~ 0.5 cm-1) that enables dramatic noise reduction in SOAs and lasers. We have used the quantum-well-based SCOWA gain medium to demonstrate significant advances in 1.5- µm optical emitter technology, including packaged SOAs having noise figure < 5 dB, single-frequency external-cavity lasers (ECLs) having kilohertz-class linewidth and ultralow relative-intensity noise (< -160 dB/Hz from 200-kHz to 10-GHz offset frequency), monolithic passively mode-locked lasers generating 0.25-W average output power, and external-cavity fiber-ring actively modelocked lasers exhibiting residual timing jitter of <10 fs (1 Hz to Nyquist). Applications that benefit from these compact SCOW-based emitters include microwave photonic (MWP) links, optoelectronic oscillators (OEOs), photonic analog-to-digital converters, and optical transmitters for free-space optical communications and laser radar systems. In this talk, we will review the SCOWA technology, describe the implementation and performance of the optical emitters that have been demonstrated, and discuss some recent subsystem results that have been enabled by these emitters.
Bio
Paul W. Juodawlkis is Assistant Leader of the Electro-Optic Materials and Devices Group at the Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is leading research on semiconductor optoelectronic devices, integrated photonics, and microwave photonics. His research efforts have focused on the development of optical sampling techniques for photonic analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), quantum-well electrorefractive modulators, high-power waveguide photodiodes, and high-power semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and their application in mode-locked lasers and narrow-linewidth external-cavity lasers. Dr. Juodawlkis received the B.S. degree from Michigan Technological University, Houghton, the M.S. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, and the Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, all in electrical engineering. Prior to his research and leadership activities in the Electro-Optic Materials and Devices Group (1999-present), he served as a radar systems engineer on a multi-sensor airborne testbed program at the Lincoln Laboratory (1988-1993), and as a member of the Ultrafast Optical Communications Laboratory (UFOCL) at Georgia Tech (1993-1999) where he investigated the ultrafast optical nonlinearities of low-temperature grown quantum-well materials and optical packet-switch architectures.
Dr. Juodawlkis has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications. He is General Co-Chair of the 2012 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and was Program Co-Chair of the 2010 CLEO. He is currently an elected member of the IEEE Photonics Society Board of Governors (2011-2013). He has served as Chair of the IEEE Photonics Society Technical Committee on Microwave Photonics (2003-2006), Program Co-Chair of the 2003 Photonics Society Summer Topical Meeting on Photonic Time/Frequency Measurement and Control, and committee member of the International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics (2004, 2008). He is also a Technical Steering Committee member of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society (2004-present). Dr. Juodawlkis is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of both the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).