VCSEL-Based Optical Frequency Combs: Toward Efficient Single-Device Comb Generation

Optical frequency combs generators (OFCGs) have demonstrated to be extremely useful tools in a wide variety of applications. The current research trends look toward compact devices that are able to offer high phase correlation between optical lines, and in this sense, mode-locked laser diodes (MLLDs), with repetition frequencies in the few gigahertz (GHz) range, and especially microresonators, with repetition frequencies of hundreds of GHz, are the most promising devices fulfilling these requirements. Nevertheless, focusing in the few GHz frequency rate, MLLDs cannot provide continuous tunability and require special devices that are still far from offering reliability and repeatability for commercial use. In this letter, we demonstrate for the first time the generation of a flat OFCG based on a single commercial vertical cavity surface emitting laser under gain-switching regime with 20 optical lines (spaced by 4.2 GHz) in a 3-dB bandwidth, offering wide tunability range and very high phase correlation between optical modes. This OFCG does not need any external modulator and it is the most energy-efficient OFCG reported to date.