Generation of pico- and femtosecond-wavelength tunable optical pulses with self-seeded laser diodes

A simple way to generate wavelength tunable ((Delta) (lambda) > 50 nm) semiconductor laser pulses with a width of a few hundred femtoseconds and a timing jitter well below 1 ps is self-seeding of a gain-switched Fabry-Perot laser diode with subsequent chirp compensation and soliton compression. The low timing jitter of the single mode laser pulses allows self-seeding to be used e.g. in high temporal resolution electro-optic sampling systems. Additionally, by controlling the electrical phase delay between two self seeded laser diodes femtosecond pulses with electrically adjustable time delay can be generated.