Jitter and dynamics of self-seeded Fabry-Perot laser diodes

We report an investigation of the time jitter and the switch-on dynamics of self-seeded gain-switched Fabry-Perot semiconductor lasers. Self-seeding leads to single-mode emission and is shown do reduce the turn-on delay time jitter to 210 fs, which is one order of magnitude lower than observed for gain-switched DFB-lasers. The number of round-trips necessary to reach the stable state after switch-on is determined using time resolved spectral measurements to be in the range of 5-10. The number of round-trips is 1-2 orders of magnitude shorter than for mode-locked lasers, thus opening the possibility of fast wavelength switching (i.e. over 5-10 bit periods). A theoretical model is in good agreement with all our results