Measurement of the effective phase-amplitude coupling factor /spl alpha//sub eff/ of high speed semiconductor optical amplifier modulator

A semiconductor optical amplifier has been used as an external modulator. The large signal response has shown a 3-dB bandwidth of 3.1 GHz when the amplifier was saturated by the input optical wave. Moreover, the effective phase-amplitude coupling factor, which is a typical parameter of a semiconductor optical amplifier, was measured to be 8. >