Integrated Low Linewidth Tunable Laser

This proposal seeks to build build a widely tunable laser (>20 nm tuning) with the phase noise performance sufficient for use with existing fiber optic interferometer hydrophone sensors on Virginia Class Submarines. In Phase I, we propose to conduct a feasibility study of modifying a widely tunable laser design to achieve low linewidth. Monolithic Photonic Integrated Circuit (PICs) technology has great potential to provide the most compact, efficient, and lightweight widely tunable lasers. With the integration of many functional blocks for light generation, tuning, and modulation on a single chip, one gains performance improvements with removed insertion losses, reduction of optoelectronic component count, and enhanced temperature and vibration stability. An integrated device can be placed in a very small footprint with very low packaging complexity. Freedom Photonics proposes in this work to develop a new type of low phase noise tunable semiconductor lasers based on our new integration platform, which allows for high laser output power, low coupling losses, and low propagation losses.