Self-sustained pulse oscillations in a quantum dot laser monolithically grown on germanium

InAs/GaAs quantum dot (QD) lasers monolithically grown on Ge or Si are a promising method to achieve low cost, large scale, and high yield optical sources for photonic integrated circuits [1]. This work shows that a free-running Ge-based QD laser can output periodic pulse oscillations with one, two and three periods, without incorporating saturable absorber or employing any external perturbations [2,3]. The QD laser under study was epitaxially grown on a 4-inch Ge-wafer by the gas-source molecular beam epitaxy, and the active region consists of five stacked dot-in-well layers [4]. The wafer was fabricated into a ridge-waveguide laser with a ridge width of 4.0 μm and a cavity length of 4.4 mm. The laser shows a lasing threshold of 60 mA at 20 °C, and the lasing peak is at 1213 nm. Figure 1(a) shows that the relative intensity noise (RIN) of the Ge-based laser pumped at 80 mA exhibits a common resonance with continuous-wave output. However, the resonance of the laser pumped at 160 mA does not become overdamped, but evolves into pulse oscillations with a high and sharp peak. Figure 1(b) shows the resonance frequency and the damping factor extracted from the RIN spectra. The resonance frequency increases with the pump current from 0.4 GHz at 80 mA up to 1.1 GHz at 170 mA, whereas the damping factor declines from 4.0 GHz down to 0.03 GHz. The damping reduction confirms the onset of peculiar pulsing dynamics for pump currents above 140 mA.