Dissertation Title:
“ Novel Optical Frequency Combs Injection Locking Architectures ”
Abstract:
Due to their highly stable timing characteristics, optical frequency combs have become instrumental in applications ranging from spectroscopy to ultra-wideband optical interconnects, high-speed signal processing, and exoplanet search. In the past few years, there has been a necessity for frequency combs to become more compact, robust to environmental disturbances, and extremely energy efficient, where photonic integration shows a clear pathway to bring optical frequency combs to satellites, airships, drones, cars, and even smartphones. Therefore, the development of chip-scale optical frequency combs has become a topic of high interest in the optics community.
This dissertation reviews the work made in the field of chip-scale optical frequency combs using optically injection locked semiconductor mode-locked lasers. First it shows the efforts in the design, characterization and calibration of several semiconductor mode-locked laser architectures on an InP-based platform. Then two separate efforts to obtain a self-referenced optical frequency comb are described. The first one based on an InP-based MLL-PIC that is enhanced via COEO multi-tone injection locking, and then amplified and broadened to an octave using pulse picking and a combination of bulk and integrated nonlinear optics.
The second approach is based on the synchronization of two lasers via regenerative harmonic injection locking, one with a repetition rate in the microwave regime (10s of GHz) and another one in the THz domain (100s of GHz), first utilizing an electro-optic modulated comb and then an integrated SiN microresonator-based Kerr-based frequency comb. This manuscript envisions future work to achieve an optical to RF link using optical injection locking architectures with long-term stabilization and the outlook of using this technique in conjunction with octave-spanning microresonator-based Kerr combs to achieve a self-referenced chip-scale optical frequency comb.
Committee in Charge:
Dr. Peter J. Delfyett, Chair
Dr. Sasan Fathpour
Dr. Patrick LiKamWa
Dr. Murat Yuksel
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