Eur. Phys. J. D (2014) 68: 186
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2014-40732-4

Regular Article

Selective injection locking of a multi-mode semiconductor laser to a multi-frequency reference beam

¹ Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 117543 Singapore, Singapore
² Institut Non Linéaire de Nice, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, CNRS, 06560 Valbonne, France
³ School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, 637371 Singapore, Singapore

^a e-mail: david.wilkowski@ntu.edu.sg

Received: 21 November 2013
Received in final form: 8 April 2014
Published online: 3 July 2014

Abstract

Injection locking is a well known and commonly used method for coherent light amplification. Usually injection locking is obtained on a single-mode laser injected by a single-frequency seeding beam. In this work we show that selective injection locking of a single-frequency may also be achieved on a multi-mode semiconductor laser injected by a multi-frequency seeding beam, if the slave laser provides sufficient frequency filtering. This selective injection locking condition depends critically on the frequency detuning between the free-running slave emission frequency and each injected frequency component. Stable selective injection locking to a set of three seeding components separated by 1.2 GHz is obtained. This system provides an amplification up to 37 dB of each component. This result suggests that, using distinct slave lasers for each frequency line, a set of mutually coherent high-power radiation modes can be tuned in the GHz frequency domain.