A narrow-linewidth semiconductor laser chip with highly linear frequency modulation response is presented and validated in two coherent sensing test experiments. This distributed feedback laser monolithic chip has an intrinsic linewidth of less than 10 kHz and an output power over 60 mW. When its injection current is modulated by a triangular function, the laser optical frequency can be modulated by more than 7 GHz at rates up to 100 kHz. The laser frequency modulation response is extremely flat up to 100 MHz, which allows correcting the residual sweep nonlinearities by a proper pre-distortion of the modulation signal. In a first test experiment, the laser was used into a monostatic FMCW lidar system. A point cloud was acquired with a field of view of 20°(H) × 10°(V) and an angular resolution of 0.05° along both axes. The acquisition was performed without averaging using a 7 mm diameter output beam of 100 mW. A high-quality point cloud including several objects of varying reflectivity was measured. In a second test experiment, the laser was used into an OFDR system for a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) experiment. A short portion of a 50 m long SMF-28 fiber was exposed to a 2 kHz acoustic signal. Processed data clearly shows a strong 2 kHz tone at the location of the acoustic perturbation. In both test experiments, the laser was successfully linearized using modulation signal pre-distortion based on interferograms obtained with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
We present multi-frequency low-noise semiconductor laser sources for resonant fiber optic gyroscope (RFOG) interrogation that have enabled excellent gyro stability over temperature. Each laser source includes three distributed feedback semiconductor laser chips coupled with micro-lenses to multi-component silicon photonics (SiP) chips. A first laser, the master, is locked to the RFOG with a Pound-Drever-Hall loop. Two slave lasers are optically phase-locked to the master laser with electrical loop bandwidths of 100 MHz. The SiP chips perform beat note detection and several other functions, such as phase and intensity noise suppression. The lasers and SiP chips are packaged in an optical engine that is controlled by compact low noise electronics. The fiber pigtails are connected to the RFOG so that light is sent in clockwise and counterclockwise directions. Tracking of the RFOG resonance frequencies in both directions allows rotation sensing. An ultra-stable differential frequency noise floor of 0.05 Hz/rt-Hz was obtained between the lasers and the coil resonator which was instrumental in achieving results for the RFOG over 60˚ C operating temperature range. The corresponding angle random walk level is less than 0.01 ˚/rt-hr and was not limited by laser differential frequency noise. The gyroscope bias drift over the tested temperature range was maintained within 0.005 ˚/hr, the best-ever published RFOG performance over temperature to date.
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