Miniaturized injection-locked laser using microelectromechanical systems technology

This letter reports a miniaturized injection-locked laser (ILL) using the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The device is formed by the integration of a MEMS grated-tuned laser and a Fabry-Perot multimode laser within dimensions of 3 mm×2 mm×0.6 mm. A movable prism serves for both active alignment and optical isolation. Single injection and multiple injections to the slave laser are both tested, it has achieved a side mode suppression ratio of 55 dB, a range of fully locked state of 0.16 nm and a rate of all optical switching at 100 MHz. Some observed phenomena such as the wave mixing and detuning hysteresis are explained qualitatively. The miniaturization may help pave the way for the ILLs to the emerging applications such as all optical networks, coherent communications and portable atomic clocks.