Optical and RF stabilization of a coupled cavity colliding pulse mode-locked laser via four-wave mixing

This paper demonstrates a novel four-wave mixing based injection locking technique, with which a high-repetition rate colliding pulse mode-locked (CPM) quantum dot laser is stabilized by locking to a high-Q master laser. The optical injection locking helps eliminate the long term frequency drift as well as the timing jitter, as witnessed by the considerable reduction in the RF and optical linewidth of the CPM laser. These improvements together with the unique characteristics of the quantum dot (QD) gain media, such as ultra-broad gain bandwidth, low linewidth enhancement factor and ultrafast gain dynamics, makes this laser design a promising candidate as a compact and cost-effective optical source for present-day high-capacity fiber communication systems.