Semiconductor activated terahertz metamaterials

Metamaterials have been developed as a new class of artificial effective media realizing many exotic phenomena and unique properties not normally found in nature. Metamaterials enable functionality through structure design, facilitating applications by addressing the severe material issues in the terahertz frequency range. Consequently, prototype functional terahertz devices have been demonstrated, including filters, antireflection coatings, perfect absorbers, polarization converters, and arbitrary wavefront shaping devices. Further integration of functional materials into metamaterial structures have enabled actively and dynamically switchable and frequency tunable terahertz metamaterials through the application of external stimuli. The enhanced light-matter interactions in active terahertz metamaterials may result in unprecedented control and manipulation of terahertz radiation, forming the foundation of many terahertz applications. In this paper, we review the progress during the past few years in this rapidly growing research field. We particularly focus on the design principles and realization of functionalities using single-layer and fewlayer terahertz planar metamaterials, and active terahertz metamaterials through the integration of semiconductors to achieve switchable and frequency-tunable response.

Optical Nonlinearity in a Novel Optical Signal Regeneration System Based on Cross-Gain Modulation Using Cascaded Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

We propose a novel optical signal regeneration system based on wavelength converters by use of cross gain modulation in cascaded semiconductor optical amplifiers. The nonlinearity in optical input/output characteristics and eye opening using NRZ signal were archived.

Researching the 915 nm high-power and high-brightness semiconductor laser single chip coupling module

Based on the high-speed development of the fiber laser in recent years, the development of researching 915 nm semiconductor laser as main pumping sources of the fiber laser is at a high speed. Because the beam quality of the laser diode is very poor, the 915 nm laser diode is generally based on optical fiber coupling module to output the laser. Using the beam-shaping and fiber-coupling technology to improve the quality of output beam light, we present a kind of high-power and high-brightness semiconductor laser module, which can output 13.22 W through the optical fiber. Based on 915 nm GaAs semiconductor laser diode which has output power of 13.91 W, we describe a thoroughly detailed procedure for reshaping the beam output from the semiconductor laser diode and coupling the beam into the optical fiber of which the core diameter is 105 μm and the numerical aperture is 0.18. We get 13.22 W from the output fiber of the module at 14.5 A, the coupling efficiency of the whole module is 95.03% and the brightness is 1.5 MW/cm2-str. The output power of the single chip semiconductor laser module achieves the advanced level in the domestic use.

Device Length Dependency of Cross Gain Modulation and Cross Phase Modulation in Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

The cross gain modulation, the cross phase modulation and their recovery time in the SOAs with the various lengths were experimentally investigated. It was found that these values strongly depended on the device length.

All-optical NRZ wavelength conversion using a Sagnac loop with optimized SOA characteristics

We investigated the all-optical wavelength conversion technique for non-return-to-zero（NRZ） signals based on a Sagnac loop interferometer using an SOA. For the wavelength conversion of the NRZ signal at and above40 Gbit/s, we used an in-house numerical SOA model to analyze the influence of the SOA carrier characteristics and the SOA length on the performance of the Sagnac loop. We found that the SOA carrier recovery time should be between 2 and 3 times of one bit duration in order to get optimum NRZ wavelength conversion. In addition to the carrier recovery time requirement, SOAs with a shorter physical length are preferred to be used in the Sagnac interferometer.