Nearly degenerate four-wave mixing in distributed feedback semiconductor lasers operating above threshold

Nearly degenerate four-wave mixing in distributed feedback semiconductor lasers above threshold in investigated theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results reveal an almost symmetric amplification of probe and conjugate fields versus frequency with respect to zero pump-probe detuning, in contrast with observations in traveling wave amplifiers. The result of the theory, based on the coupled mode formalism, is a set of nonlinear differential equations which are solved in the mean field approximation. The theory is shown to match well with the experimental results when the effect of the nonlinear gain compression is taken into account