IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 45, NO.

5, MAY 2009 431

Emission Directionality of Semiconductor Ring

Lasers: A Traveling-Wave Description
Julien Javaloyes and Salvador Balle

Abstract—We use a traveling-wave model for explaining the ex-

perimentally observed changes in the directionality of the emission
of semiconductor ring lasers and its different behavior when cur-
rent is increased or decreased. The modulation of the cavity losses
imposed by the light extraction sections together with the thermal
shift of the gain spectrum and spatial hole burning in the carrier
density play a crucial role in the directionality of the emission and
its changes with operation current. The differences as the current
is increased or decreased correspond to the different role played
by spatial hole burning.
Index Terms—Coupled cavities, ring lasers, semiconductor
lasers, thermal effects, traveling-wave modeling.

I. INTRODUCTION

S EMICONDUCTOR ring lasers (SRLs) are interesting de-

vices from the technological point of view because they
do not require cleaved facets or gratings in order to achieve the
necessary optical feedback for lasing. In SRL, light extraction is
accomplished via coupling from the SRL waveguide into one or
several output waveguides (see Fig. 1 for a general layout of the
SRL structure), which allows to easily control the total losses in
the SRL by tailoring the coupling length and strength [1]. These
structures naturally possess the characteristics of Sagnac inter-
ferometers, and their easily achievable monolithic integration
opens the path for developing practical devices for wavelength
filtering and wavelength multiplexing/demultiplexing applica-
tions [2].
Ideal ring lasers present perfect degeneracy between waves
traveling clockwise and counterclockwise, and their strong
competition for the gain should therefore lead to bistable
unidirectional operation of the device [3], which offers a
great potential for applications such as all-optical memories,
switching, and gating [4]. However, in real SRLs, the output
couplers break the rotational invariance of these devices, and
imperfections introduce coupling of the clockwise and coun-
terclockwise fields; therefore, the cavity modes are no longer
traveling waves, but they are determined by the boundary condi-
tions imposed by the light extraction sections [5]. The peculiar
Manuscript received July 28, 2008; revised November 20, 2008. Current ver-
sion published April 08, 2009. This work was supported in part by Ministerio
de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) through Project TEC2006-13887-C05-03. The
work of J. Javaloyes was supported by the Juan de la Cierva Program.
J. Javaloyes is with the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8LT, U.K. (e-mail: julien.javaloyes@elec.
gla.ac.uk).
S. Balle is with the Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats (IMEDEA), Uni-
versitat d les Illes Balears, E-07071 Esporles, Spain.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JQE.2009.2014079
0018-9197/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
Fig. 1. Schematics of the semiconductor ring laser configuration. A four-port
evanescent coupler allows extraction of light from the ring laser.
symmetry of SRLs permits a large variety of emission states
beyond unidirectional operation. Wavelength multistability,
with external injection used to select the desired cavity mode,
has been demonstrated [6]. Also, regimes of bidirectional emis-
sion, bistable regimes of (almost) unidirectional emission and
a regime of “alternate oscillations” (AO)—where the dominant
direction of lasing oscillates periodically in time—have been
reported in large-diameter SRLs [7], [8]. These regimes are
often all present in the same device depending on the bias
current applied to the laser, giving rise to a series of dynamical
bifurcations from one state to the other, as reported in [8].
They are all not only quite interesting from a dynamical point
of view, but also highly relevant for the development of new
functional devices as, e.g., the semiconductor laser gyroscope
[9] or devices for all-optical switching and optical memories
[4]. Detailed theoretical understanding of the governing mech-
anisms is required for device optimization, which can also
provide highly valuable insight into their nonlinear dynamics.
Another intriguing characteristics of SRLs is that, once in
the unidirectional regime, the dominant direction of emission
switches as the bias current is further increased [10]. These
flips in lasing direction—which happen at almost regular current
intervals—are accompanied by abrupt jumps in the emission
wavelength. The change in wavelength corresponds to several
mode spacings of the SRL, the precise number of mode spac-
ings depending on the design of the cavity. Interestingly, the
lasing direction remains stable when the current is decreased,
and the wavelength changes correspond essentially to single-
mode spacings of the SRL cavity.
432
Some of the above characteristics of SRLs have been ex-
plained with a rate-equation model [7] that describes the ampli-
tudes of the pair of counter-propagating waves that correspond
to a single longitudinal resonance of the SRL cavity. These
amplitudes are linearly coupled through backscattering—either
distributed as due to sidewall scattering, or localized as due
to the output coupler’s reflectivity—and nonlinearly coupled
through gain saturation [3], [11]. The model allowed for the suc-
cessful explanation of the initial regime of bidirectional emis-
sion followed by the AO regime, and finally the almost unidi-
rectional regime. The influence of the different parameters on
the dynamics has been thoroughly analyzed in [12] by means
of a reduction of the original model to a two-variable model.
However, issues involving wavelength changes fall clearly be-
yond the scope of this model.
In order to overcome such a limitation, multimode rate-equa-
tion models have also been developed [3], [13]. In this way, the
spectral features can be included through the different mecha-
nisms of competition among longitudinal modes. Such models,
based on a description of the induced polarization, provide an
intuitive picture of the mechanisms underlying mode dynamics,
and they have allowed to successfully fit the emission spectra
under different operation conditions, hereby permitting to de-
termine several important device parameters. Nevertheless, one
of the main difficulties encountered in this type of models is the
large number of parameters required to describe the different
nonlinear mechanisms of modal coupling—such as carrier den-
sity pulsations, spatial and spectral hole burning, and carrier
heating. Another important aspect is that cavity losses lead to
spatially varying modal profiles that induce inhomogeneities
in the carrier density which generate additional mode coupling
terms that are difficult to compute. Finally, one has to determine
a priori which modes have to be accounted for in the modeling:
increasing the number of modes allows in principle to improve
the dynamical description of the system, but at the same time
more mode-coupling parameters have to be determined.
Another possibility to circumvent the limitations inherent to
rate equation models is to describe the dynamics of the device by
considering the propagation of electromagnetic waves inside the
SRL cavity. In this type of description, no modal decomposition
is performed, thus the number of modes is not limited a priori.
In addition, the boundary conditions of the cavity and an appro-
priate description of the interaction of the optical field with the
active medium allow, at least in principle, to include all potential
mechanisms of modal coupling with a much reduced parameter
set as compared to multimode rate equations. For these reasons,
traveling-wave models (TWM) were developed long ago for
solid-state and gas lasers [14], in order to describe multimode
operation, -switching, or passive and active mode-locking.
However, one of the main difficulties in TWM for semicon-
ductor lasers is to properly describe the interaction between the
active medium and the optical field in active semiconductors
[15]. Semiconductor Bloch equations, either with or without
many-body effects, are very complex [16], [17], and their high
computational cost limits their applicability to studying dy-
namics over short time intervals. This has stimulated the search
for simplified models capable of describing device dynamics
IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 45, NO. 5, MAY 2009
on longer time scales at the price of not being applicable on
ultrashort (picosecond or subpicosecond) time scales [18]–[20].
Another difficulty encountered in TWM is the correct incorpo-
ration of the boundary conditions for the system in time domain,
which might become complicated if the geometry of the device
is not simple. In spite of these difficulties, TWM has previously
been used to study the dynamics of semiconductor lasers with
relatively simple boundary conditions, like multimode dynamics
in Fabry–Perot semiconductor laser diodes [21], [22] or the
effects of optical injection [23] and optical feedback [21], [24]
in these systems. In addition, they have even been used to study
broad-area devices [16], passive mode locking in semiconductor
lasers [25], [26], or to model the behavior of semiconductor
optical amplifiers [27], [28].
In this paper, we apply a TWM that includes the optical sus-
ceptibility of the semiconductor in intraband quasi-equilibrium
to analyze the directional properties of the emission from SRLs.
In Section II, we summarize the TWM, whose deduction is pre-
sented in the Appendix; we discuss the boundary conditions
imposed by the output coupler and output waveguides, which
strongly influence the emission characteristics of these devices,
and we briefly describe the numerical implementation of the
model. In Section III, we compare the numerical results ob-
tained for different configurations and working conditions with
available experimental data. A summary of our work is given in
Section IV.
II. THEORETICAL MODEL
Here, we summarize the time-domain TWM for the optical
field in an SRL, which is thoroughly developed in the Appendix.
Next we discuss in detail the boundary conditions for the TW
equations as imposed by the light extraction sections. We con-
sider that propagation of the fields in the output waveguides is
linear, so it is not necessary to account for additional material
equations (carrier density and polarization) in these regions. Fi-
nally, we briefly discuss the numerical implementation of the
resulting theoretical model.
A. Traveling-Wave Model
We consider that the laser emits a quasi-monochromatic field
whose spectral width is much smaller than the optical carrier fre-
quency . We moreover consider that, in this frequency range,
the laser waveguide supports a single transverse mode whose
effective index is . Since the emission can be bidirectional,
we describe the optical field in the laser cavity by means of
the slowly varying amplitudes of the counter-propagating op-
tical waves, , whose evolution along the cavity is given
by the traveling-wave equations
(1)
where is the internal loss per unit length and is the effec-
tive group velocity for wavepackets centered at . The source
term is the projection of the slowly varying amplitude
of the active medium’s polarization around the optical carrier
frequency onto the transverse mode of the waveguide, which
JAVALOYES AND BALLE: EMISSION DIRECTIONALITY OF SRLs: A TRAVELING-WAVE DESCRIPTION 433

and the slow spatial variation of due to the field profile in the
cavity.
The evolution of and is given by (see the Appendix)

(5)

Fig. 2. Gain (left panels) and refraction index (right panels) of the active
medium as a function of the (normalized) frequency. The solid, dotted, and
dashed lines correspond to the exact susceptibility and the Padé and parabolic (6)
approximations, respectively.

where is the current injected into the active region, is the

describes the optical response of the active medium, i.e., the gain
and carrier-induced refractive index change.
For describing the polarization of the active medium, we
use an analytical approximation to the optical susceptibility
that includes spectral hole burning (SHB) within the
quasi-equilibrium and rotating-wave approximations [20]. This
approximation keeps the nonlinear dependence on the carrier
density and the optical intensity, while providing both a broad
gain spectrum and a dispersion curve, and it allows to describe
dynamics on time scales longer than ps. As discussed in
the Appendix, the source term is determined by
(2)
where is the optical confinement factor [29], is the gain-com-
pression coefficient due to SHB and and are the co-
efficients of a (1,1) Padé approximation with respect to of the
susceptibility. The Padé approximation (see Fig. 2) allows us
to accurately describe the optical susceptibility over a spectral
range THz much larger than that of the widely used para-
bolic approximation with a marginal increase in computational
complexity.
Moreover
(3)
ambipolar diffusion coefficient, is the spontaneous emis-
sion rate corresponding to a carrier density , and
. It is worth noting that is rather a small
quantity unless the medium is strongly saturated, since its decay
rate is given by s for typical semiconductor
parameters, hence LHB arises mainly from the variations of .
However, it is known that the diffusion coefficient may play an
important role in the laser dynamics since too low a value desta-
bilizes steady solutions [30].
B. Boundary Conditions for SRL
The TW equations (1) have to be supplemented with
boundary conditions appropriate to SRLs. This requires a
detailed analysis of how the evanescent couplers and the output
waveguides mix the slowly varying amplitudes of the field.
For definiteness, we consider a SRL with a single evanescent
coupler that extracts light from the ring into two output waveg-
uides, as schematically shown in Fig. 1, where we consider the
general case with external fields injected into the SRL.
For the sake of simplicity, we consider that the evanescent
coupler is ideal, i.e., it simply splits the input fields without any
internal losses, with two identical, single-mode waveguides at
the operating wavelength. We also neglect reflectivities at the
coupler–waveguide interface, which is usually a good approxi-
mation because the output waveguides and the coupler have the
same structure. Then, the coupler can be described in frequency
domain by a transmission matrix that connects the input and
output fields

describes nonlinear self- and cross-saturation of the gain in the (7)

active region and couples the forward and backward waves with
the cross-saturation term being twice that of self-saturation.
The last term in (2) describes coupling of the forward and
backward waves through the grating in the carrier density at Hence
twice the optical wavelength that might appear in the laser cavity
due to the presence of the two counter-propagating waves. In-
deed, we have decomposed the total carrier density as (8)

(4) where , , with

being the coupling coefficient and the coupler length. There-
where is the quasi-homogeneous carrier density in the SRL fore, gives the amount of power injected through port 1
cavity and and are the slowly varying ampli- which is diverted to port 4. In addition, imaginary exponential
tudes of the grating in the carrier density. Longitudinal SHB represents the phase accumulated by the field when traveling
(LHB) thus comes into play through two different mechanisms: from port 1 to port 2 during a time , given by the
the grating terms associated with the standing wave effects speed of light in the coupler’s waveguide.
434
Additional conditions are imposed at the extremities of the
output waveguides. In frequency domain, they read
(9)
(10)
where ( ) denote the internal reflectivities (external trans-
mitivities) of the facets for the field amplitudes, and are
the injected fields. These relations together with (8) impose the
boundary conditions. By Fourier transforming back to the time
domain and recalling that the fields are quasi-monochromatic
around , we have that
(11)
(12)
(13)
(14)
(15)
(16)
where , , are the
times required to travel from one end to the other of the
left and right output waveguides, respectively. In addition,
we have defined and
as the effective facet re-
flectivity and transmitivity, respectively, including the possible
gain or attenuation as well as the optical phase acquired in such
a trip. Finally, are the slowly-varying amplitudes of the
injected fields in the reference frequency frame . It is worth
remarking that the boundary conditions (11)–(16) involve
fields at previous times, hereby describing the interferometric
effects in the light extraction section. The maximum time delay
involved is —i.e., the round-trip time
in the Fabry–Perot cavity defined by the output waveguides
plus the coupler— thus imposing that fields between time and
have to be stored in the numerical simulations.
In summary, the final TWM for the SRL is given by (1), (2),
(5) and (6), with the boundary conditions (11)–(16). The sus-
ceptibility and its derivatives, as well as the nonlinear gain com-
pression correction, are given in the Appendix. Finally, for the
carrier density we consider that there is no carrier flux across
the laser boundaries, i. e. . The upper panels in Fig. 3 display the Light-Current char-
C. Numerical Implementation
The numerical implementation of the model involves two dif-
ferent stages: in a first stage we determine the carrier frequency
, and we then perform the numerical integration of the TWM.
In order to determine the expansion point, we determine the
laser threshold by computing the “off” solution of the system
and analyzing its linear stability. The threshold current corre-
sponds to the minimum current such that some monochromatic
perturbation passes from being linearly stable to linearly un-
stable. Since we do so with the full boundary conditions for the
field and keeping the whole frequency dependence of the optical
susceptibility, we can determine that, for this current, only per-
turbations with a well-defined frequency are not damped,
and we then use , the lasing frequency at threshold.
This general procedure can be simplified in some special
cases. For instance, in edge-emitting Fabry–Perot laser diodes
IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 45, NO. 5, MAY 2009
the longitudinal mode spacing is so tight that one can safely
set as the frequency of the gain peak when it equals the
total distributed losses. Or, in single-mode VCSELs it is quite
accurate to set to the modal frequency. However, in SRL
we cannot benefit from such simplifications because of the
complicated structure of the boundary conditions, which makes
difficult to foresee which frequency will lead to the maximum
net modal gain.
We numerically solve the TWM by adapting the semi-im-
plicit, second order algorithm described in [31]—which was
originally designed for two-levels atoms—to our polarization
dynamics, (2). We checked our implementation by numerically
verifying both its consistency and second-order convergence
[32] in the more tractable case of a Fabry-Pérot cavity–where
it is possible to obtain an analytical expression of the eigen-
modes–and we choose a fixed, random superposition of 20
modes. In the noiseless case, this superposition serves as the
very same initial condition for different simulations, each with
an increasingly fine spatial discretization. We let the system to
evolve freely during a round-trip and compute the error of the
numerical solution relatively to an “exact” reference solution
obtained with a very fine-grid discretization ( mesh
points), finding the expected quadratic dependence with step
size and tendency to zero for zero step size.
III. RESULTS
In this section we analyze the impact of the facet reflectivities
and spatial hole burning on the directionality of the emission
of SRL. Thus, we fix the other parameters and we consider a
SRL emitting at m with a round-trip time
ps, an effective index , internal losses of
cm and an optical confinement factor . For the
light extraction section we consider a coupler with
and a length corresponding to ps, and the lengths of the
output waveguides corresponding to ps. The decay
rate for the polarization is ps , the spontaneous
emission rate ns and the diffusion coefficient
is cm s . The optical response of the semiconductor
is characterized by , , and a gain compression
factor cm . Finally, we consider that the thermal
shift of the gain peak from the start to the end of the ramp is
taken to be 6 nm which corresponds to times the modal
spacing of the SRL.
acteristics in both emission directions as the bias current is in-
creased for a SRL with while the lower panels
show the dominant frequency of the optical field in the same
conditions. In these simulations, the sweeping time of the whole
current ramp is 1 s. When the current is increased just above
threshold, the SRL operates in a bidirectional emission regime,
as expected from the fact that the reflectivity of the couplers
leads to standing wave operation and destroys unidirectional so-
lutions. This regime is maintained upon increasing current, al-
though modal jumps occur in this process because of thermal
drift of the gain spectrum. It is worth noting that in the increasing
ramp, jumps of two modes happen due to a subtle interplay be-
tween the modulation of the cavity losses and the curvature and
shift of the gain spectrum. For high enough current, nonlinear
gain saturation dominates and destabilizes each pair of standing
wave solutions into two bistable, almost unidirectional emission
states. In-between these regimes (see inset) the power emitted
JAVALOYES AND BALLE: EMISSION DIRECTIONALITY OF SRLs: A TRAVELING-WAVE DESCRIPTION
(a) (b)
Fig. 3. (a) and (b) Bifurcation diagram for an increasing and decreasing current
ramp, respectively. Upper and lower panels: forward and backward intensities
and average normalized frequency, respectively.
(a) (b)
Fig. 4. (a) Carrier density (lower panel) and field profiles (upper panel) along
the cavity for J = 5. Note that the rotational symmetry is broken due to LHB.
(b) Optical spectrum of the forward and backward field components. Note that
the depressed mode has larger power on the red-wing of the spectrum due to the
-factor.
in each direction displays periodic alternate oscillations (AO) at
a low frequency ( MHz). In the unidirectional regime, in-
creasing the current leads to modal jumps of either two or three
modes, due to the effects mentioned above. These modal jumps
are accompanied by a reversal of the dominant emission direc-
tion. In the unidirectional regime, the rotational symmetry of
the SRL is broken due to the LHB imposed by the field profile
(see Fig. 4), an effect that increases with current. The dominant
direction has quite a symmetrical spectrum with side-mode sup-
pression ratio dB, while the depressed direction exhibits
larger power on the red-wing of the spectrum due to the cou-
pling through and the factor, indicating its tendency to
switch-on.
Instead, when the bias current is reduced, the corresponding
– curve (see right panels in Fig. 3) also exhibits modal jumps
but no directional switching; moreover, the modal jumps in this
case occur mainly among consecutive SRL modes. It is note-
worthy that the thermal drift of the gain curve is the same but
in opposite directions when increasing or decreasing the current
by the same amount. We note that the rate of change of current
can slightly affect this picture as typical in bistable systems, but
435
the long computation time impedes us from reproducing the ex-
perimental quasi-static change of current.
Devices with higher facet reflectivities evolve from the bidi-
rectional regime to the asymmetrical bistable regime for higher
currents, while devices with lower facet reflectivities show
asymmetric operation after a small regime of AOs very close
to the laser threshold. However, the qualitative phenomenology
of directional switching is essentially identical, although the
higher the reflectivity the stronger the modulation that the cou-
pler imprints upon the SRL modes, hence the modes remain for
larger current intervals and the modal jumps clearly correspond
to either two or three modes.
These results are in good agreement with the experimental
observations [7], [8] on different SRL devices. Moreover, while
the SRL works in a single-longitudinal mode they qualitatively
agree with the theoretical predictions of the normal form model
given in [12]. The increase of the critical current for asym-
metric operation when the linear coupling between CW and
CCW waves is increased qualitatively corresponds to the in-
crease in facet reflectivity. More complicated is the interpreta-
tion of the bifurcation sequence as a function of the real and
imaginary part of the linear coupling. In [12] the conservative
and dissipative part of the linear coupling between CW and
CCW are taken to be independent of both the current and the
modal frequency; however, in our modelling they are self-con-
sistently defined from the frequency dependent boundary con-
ditions and thus they are not only different for each mode, but
they are also current-dependent due to the thermal shift of the
gain curve.
We have performed a number of simulations in order to an-
alyze the influence of the different parameters on the direc-
tional switching. Although the underlying dynamical mecha-
nism is not yet clear and deserves a separate and detailed study,
we can attribute the observed asymmetry for increasing or de-
creasing currents to the nonlinear dependence of LHB on the
field intensities.
The directional reversal upon increasing current happens be-
cause of the shift of the gain peak together with LHB in the car-
rier density. We have numerically checked that the lasing mode
remains the same when the thermal shift coefficient is set to
zero. Besides, we tested the influence of LHB by letting
while maintaining constant the current threshold by increasing
accordingly the internal losses . In this regime, where the ef-
fect of LHB can safely be disregarded, the directionality of the
emission remains stable during modal jumps. We conclude that
while the shift of the gain spectrum leads to modal jumps, LHB
eventually favors the counter propagating wave over the coprop-
agating wave on the next mode that starts lasing; however, it
is difficult to disentangle LHB from the effects of reflectivities
since for the output waveguides play no role.
Finally, we remark that our numerical results indicate that
the reflectivities and phases of the light-extraction sections con-
tribute in a subtle way to the details of the switching. This agrees
with the observed variability of the phenomenon with device
and working conditions [7], [8], but makes the dynamical anal-
ysis extremely delicate.
IV. CONCLUSION
We have analyzed how the directionality of the emission of
semiconductor ring lasers depends on current and device struc-
ture by means of a traveling-wave model. The model incorpo-
436
rates the optical response of the semiconductor via a Padé ap-
proximation. The general boundary conditions for the system
have been analyzed in detail due to their strong influence on the
different dynamical regimes observed in systems of this kind.
For devices with weak facet reflectivities, the model is able to
successfully reproduce bistability and switching between uni-
directional and bidirectional emission, describing not only the
light–current characteristics but also the wavelength jumps of
the emission that occur upon direction reversal. For devices with
stronger reflectivities in the output waveguides, the regime of al-
ternate oscillations shrinks and the devices switch from bidirec-
tional to unidirectional operation almost directly as the current
is increased. These results are in good agreement with available
experimental data.
APPENDIX
The Optical Field: In order to develop a time-domain
model for the propagation of the optical field, we start by
considering a monochromatic field component at frequency
in a quasi-planar waveguide defined by a distribution of
refractive indexes . We assume that the waveguide
supports a single -polarized mode whose effective index is
. The total field amplitude can be factorized in a transverse
and longitudinal part
where is the normalized mode of the waveguide and
is the longitudinal profile of the electric field.
When an active material is placed inside the core of the
waveguide, the longitudinal field profile obeys the
wave equation
(17)
where is the optical confinement
factor [29], which measures the fraction of optical power that is
in the active region, is the refractive index of the waveguide
core, and is the imaginary part of the refractive index of
the waveguide, that accounts for internal losses due to residual
absorption, scattering, and curvature. In general, hence
. This imposes the relation of dispersion
for the traveling waves as .
In addition, the source term
(18)
is the projection of the polarization of the active medium,
, onto the considered transverse mode.
The light emission from a laser is quasi-monochromatic
around an optical carrier frequency , hence we express the
field as a superposition of left- and right-traveling waves
(19)
IEEE JOURNAL OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS, VOL. 45, NO. 5, MAY 2009
with the optical carrier wavevector and
evolving on a length scale much longer than the optical wave-
length. Substituting (19) into (17) yields
(20)
where we have defined the internal losses
and
(21)
the longitudinal average being taken over a scale much longer
than the optical wavelength but much shorter than the amplifi-
cation length.
Since the field is quasi-monochromatic around , it can be
expressed in the time domain as
(22)
where are the slowly varying amplitudes of the forward
and backward waves. Moreover, this allows us to approximate
(23)
where is the inverse of the group velocity in
the waveguide, and is the second-order
waveguide dispersion parameter. For the sake of simplicity, we
shall henceforth neglect group velocity dispersion as well as
possible dispersion of the internal loss.
Thus, Fourier transforming back to the time domain (20),
are determined by the TW equations
(24)
where the source term is the slowly varying amplitude of the ac-
tive medium’s polarization around the optical carrier frequency
(25)
The Active Medium: We model the optical response of the
active medium within the intraband quasi-equilibrium approx-
imation, which limits the validity of the model to time scales
above 1 ps, which is the time required for the carriers to reach in-
traband quasi-equilibrium. For these time scales, the dynamics
of the carriers in each small volume of the laser can be described
at once with a local quasi-Fermi level and thus it can be treated
as a single entity, the local carrier density , that in turn de-
termines the polarization of the active medium. Carrier-induced
bandgap renormalization can be included in a rigid band approx-
imation, and thermal shift of the gain curve will be phenomeno-
logically included via a current-dependent gap energy.
JAVALOYES AND BALLE: EMISSION DIRECTIONALITY OF SRLs: A TRAVELING-WAVE DESCRIPTION
The Carrier Density: Assuming that the transverse and
lateral dimensions of the active region of the SRL are small
compared to the diffusion length, the carrier density within the
active region is uniform over the transverse section. In the ro-
tating-wave approximation, its time evolution is given by
(26)
where is the current injected into the active region while
( ) is its volume (transverse section), is the electron charge,
and is the recombination rate through all mechanisms
other than stimulated emission. Finally, is the ambipolar dif-
fusion coefficient for carriers in the active region.
With the decomposition for the field and polarization in
clockwise and counterclockwise traveling waves, it is clear
that the carrier density develops a longitudinal structure with
periodicity at half the optical carrier wavelength. This fast
grating in the carrier density might lead to the generation of
polarization (and field) components at , , and the
corresponding components in the optical field and thus in the
carrier density, becoming an exceedingly complex problem.
Helpfully, this infinite hierarchy can be truncated [21] because
the strong spatial diffusion occurring in semiconductor media
imposes that the decay rates of the gratings are increasingly
quadratically with wavevector, hence the grating amplitudes
rapidly decrease with increasing wavevector. In fact, the typical
total decay time for the homogeneous component of the carrier
density is of the order of hundreds of picoseconds, while the
decay time associated with carrier diffusion for the first grating
is of the order of 1 ps for typical values cm s.
Therefore, we consider only the first grating component and
decompose the carrier density as
(27)
Assuming that , their evolution equations read
(28)
(29)
where is the differential carrier life-
time around the steady state, and we have neglected the terms
in and as compared with .
The Polarization of the Active Medium: In order to describe
the polarization of the active medium induced by the field, we
use the analytical approximation to the optical susceptibility de-
veloped in [20], which includes gain compression due to spec-
tral hole burning. The susceptibility reads
(30)
437
where
In this equation (see [20] for the details) is the transparency
carrier density, and are constants characteristic of each ma-
terial, , and . is the
gain compression parameter due to spectral hole burning, whose
dominant effect is an almost frequency-independent reduction
of the gain, while the broadening of the gain spectrum can be
safely disregarded unless very broadband dynamics is consid-
ered [20]. Therefore, we have that
(31)
where we defined . It should be noted
that, although spectral-hole burning is the only nonlinear mech-
anism explicitly included in , nonlinearities like spatial-hole
burning, four-wave mixing and carrier density pulsations are ac-
counted for through the local dependence of the total carrier
density on the total optical field.
The previous assumption of small grating terms in the carrier
density implies that the medium is not heavily saturated. Thus,
to the first order in the small quantities, the polarization reads
(32)
where is the confinement factor of the optical field to the active
region [29], and . The term
in (32) corresponds to self- and cross-saturation of the
gain in the active region, with the cross-saturation term being
twice that of self-saturation. The term also couples the
forward and backward waves through the grating in the carrier
density.
Still, the constitutive relation (32) is given in the frequency
domain, while its time-domain form is required for the TWM.
The complicated structure of does not allow to directly
Fourier transform to time domain and obtain a closed-form
expression for . Hence, we use a (1, 1) Padé approx-
imant [33] to the material susceptibility . In order to
do so—and for later numerical purposes—it is convenient to
choose the carrier frequency to be the emission frequency
of the SRL at threshold, which in turn determines the carrier
wavevector . Changing to this new reference frame amounts
to make the substitution
in (31). The (1, 1) Padé approximation to reads
(33)
(34)
(35)
438
where subindexes denote partial derivation with respect to .
Substituting this into (32) and transforming back to the time
domain yields
where we have neglected the product of the (small) nonlinear
terms with and because these factors are of order
, and we have considered that varies on time scales much
slower than those of the field, so that the convolution terms can
be factorized.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the IOLOS-FP6-2005-IST-5
project partners for fruitful discussions and communication
of experimental data prior to publication. Part of this work
was performed at the Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avançats
(IMEDEA), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-
Universitat de les Illes Balears, Esporles, Spain.
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Julien Javaloyes received the M.S. degree in statistical physics and nonlinear
phenomena from the ENS Lyon, Lyon, France, and the Ph.D. degree from the
INLN, Nice, France, in 2003.
Following his dissertation, he was with the Theoretical Nonlinear Optics
Group (ONT), Brussels, Belgium, and the Departement de Fisica, Universitat
de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. His current research focuses on
nonlinear dynamics of semiconductor lasers.
Salvador Balle received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, in 1984 and 1988,
respectively.
After a postdoctoral stage with Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, he
joined the Department of Physics, Universidad de las Islas Baleares, Palma
de Mallorca, Spain, in 1993. His research focuses on the nonlinear optical
dynamics of semiconductor lasers and amplifiers.