A team of scientists from the U.S. has demonstrated a new design of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser system that provides record-fast temporal bandwidth. The developed fiber laser technology is based on the combination of numerous transverse coupled cavities that increases the optical feedback of the fiber laser.
It should be noted that the new laser system plays a crucial role in the production of energy-efficient and high-speed optical interconnects in data centers and supercomputers. To be more precise, vertical-cavity systems are a class of semiconductor laser beam diodes combined with a monolithic resonator that produces laser beam light in a direction perpendicular to the chip surface.
Herewith, this type of fiber laser systems becomes more popular thanks to its advantages such as compact size and high optoelectronic performance. For instance, compact laser systems can be applied as “an optical source in highspeed, short-wavelength communications, and optical data networks.”
Additionally, small fiber lasers find applications in automotive or data communications to detect dense traffic and high-speed transmission. Nevertheless, the current fiber laser system has its speed limitation such as the 3-dB bandwidth. Moreover, such parameters as thermal effects, parasitic resistance, capacitance, and nonlinear gain effects also influence the laser.
The thing is that the direct modulation of this fiber laser system cannot be higher than 30 GHz because of the nonlinear optical amplification phenomenon. Nonetheless, the new fiber laser technology has a revolutionary novel design for lasers. The used multi-feedback technique that unites numerous coupled cavities allows for carefully direct and control of the laser beam. Therefore, the researchers can increase the strength of the feedback and expand the temporal laser beam speed leading to overcoming the current limitations.
The fiber laser technology is novel. Now the direct feedback from each cavity is required to be moderate and then the researchers can direct them accurately via the coupled cavities resulting in more design freedom of laser systems. They also claim that new modulation bandwidth can achieve the 100 GHz range.
Thus, the design of fiber lasers has greatly changed. The novel coupled cavities enable to carefully monitor the feedback to the laser system reached by greatly slowing the laser beam light down. Moreover, now it is possible to produce lasers of various designs for particular applications in both fundamental science and technology due to this technique. The new applications of this fiber laser system include the automotive industry where the laser beam acts as a proximity sensor or the smartphone’s face ID, as well as the use for quantum information processors such as coherent Ising machines.
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