Integrated Low Jitter Mode Locked Lasers

Mode Locked Lasers (MLLs), will likely be extremely useful for many military applications because of the low timing jitter ( < 100 fs), narrow pulse width ( < 50 fs), and high peak pulse intensity of MLLs. Important military applications that benefit from MLLs include high ENOB Analog to Digital converters (ADCs), encryption, LIDAR, high speed communications, and optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR). The key hurdles for the practical deployment of MLLs in these application spaces are the small size and low weight requirements. Most MLLs come in either optical table top variants, or fiber variants, that require huge amounts of electrical power, and occupy several cubic feet of space and are adversely impacted by a typical military environment. In this SBIR, we propose the development of a chip scale mode locked laser with superior performance and high efficiency that can occupy less than 0.5 cm3.