Abstract

Mode-locked laser diodes (MLLDs) are excellent candidates for generating ultrashort high frequency pulses for a number of applications, including optical clocking, sampling, and clock recovery. Although more prone to noise than active MLLDs, passive MLLDs do not require any external electrical oscillator. But many applications for such lasers require highly stable optical pulses with sub-picosecond timing jitter and in this paper we report a technique for reducing the RF phase noise in a passive MLLD. Regenerative mode locking is a technique used to significantly reduce the timing jitter by providing a self-referencing mechanism to continuously correct the phase timing of the pulses [1, 2]. However, many of the current techniques used are based on electrical extraction and high-Q RF filtering of the pulses, which adds several components and considerable system complexity. Here we present a simplified all-optical regenerative mode locking technique which can provide significant reductions in phase noise and timing jitter.

© 2011 Optical Society of America