Integrated solid-state lasers have the advantage of offering narrow linewidth, well below the MHz range, making them ideal for various applications, from sensing to telecommunication. High coherence free-running lasers are difficult to characterize, due to the combination of a reduced linewidth with potential frequency drift. Conventional techniques such as optical self-heterodyning solutions require decorrelation lengths of several hundreds of km, and standard RF phase noise measurements are not compatible with slow varying effects due to the presence of frequency drift. In order to analyze the coherence of ion-exchanged co-doped Er-Yb integrated glass lasers during free-running operations, we developed a direct measurement of the optical phase by analyzing heterodyne signals in the time domain. From the analysis of the phase evolution in time, we estimate the linewidth of ion exchange glass lasers, estimated to be 1 kHz, while being able to discriminate optical contributions from slow varying processes generating frequency drift.
Terahertz applications have been extensively studied during the last decade since they allow not only increasing the bandwidth of telecom systems but also the detection of many organic molecules in solid and liquid phase, including hazardous materials such as explosives. In this contribution, we present a device that allows generating frequencies in the Terahertz domain through the heterodyning of signals emitted by two distributed feedback lasers made by ion exchange on a erbium-ytterbium co-doped glass. Thanks to the intrinsic thermal stability of the glass substrate, the slow dynamic of the amplifier medium and since the laser pairs are integrated on a single chip and identically pumped by the same sources, stable frequencies have been generated in the millimeter and sub-Terahertz frequency range, without any thermal or electrical control loop being implemented.
Erbium-doped integrated DFB lasers on glass exhibit a thermal stability and a very narrow linewidth that has been proven useful for many applications ranging from DWDM and Optomicrowave transmissions to airborne LIDAR. If the technologies used for the Erbium-doped active waveguides can differ (alumina, phosphate and silicate glasses have been reported among others), the laser cavity is always obtained thanks to a long Bragg grating implemented on the chip surface. Realizing cm-long submicrometric structure is a challenge that has been successfully overcome, but having such fragile features exposed on the top of a device entails several problems of packaging when reliability is concerned. Until now, this key issue has been addressed by depositing a conformal thin-film on the device surface, which is a complicated task since the deposited layer should be conformal, match the proper refractive index and respect the thermal budget of the process flow. In this paper, we present a different approach for the realization of Er-doped DFB lasers on glass where the grating-based cavity is implemented on a passive wafer that is then flip-chipped and wafer bonded on an Erbiumdoped phosphate glass containing active ion-exchanged waveguides. First results proved that a stable emission at a wavelength of 1.55 μm has been achieved for a fiber-coupled output power of more than 1mW.
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