Towards monolithic semiconductor photonic crystal passively mode locked laser for two-photon microscopy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Semiconductor Monolithic Passively Mode Locked Lasers (MMLLs) have been demonstrated and have a variety of applications including sensing, in optical communications and optical clock generation. The major advantage that these semiconductor light sources possess is their compact size, high efficiency, low cost and robustness. Also the ability to access different wavelengths using various semiconductor materials is a big advantage. The inability to get these lasers to operate at low repetition rates and the limited peak output power of the pulses are the two major limitations of these lasers. The repetition rate is inversely proportional to the semiconductor laser cavity length. The lowest repetition rate in current MMLLs is around 1GHz. This rate is limited by the complexity involved in the fabrication of centimeter long semiconductor laser cavities. The material loss, dispersion and carrier radiative recombination lifetime also limit the output repetition rate. Lower repetition rate lasers can be used in low frequency integrated optical circuits and also for imaging especially for Two-Photon Microscopy (TPM). TPM works by exciting florescence dyes using two photons instead of one. This requires pulsed lasers with high peak power and high energy per pulse. TPM is currently done by using expensive and bulky Ti:Sapphire mode locked lasers that can produce subpicosecond pulses at a repetition rate of order of 100 MHz. The possible use of semiconductor lasers for this application can transform this field by dramatically reducing the cost of imaging and allowing for dramatically smaller sized and more mobile imaging solutions. One potential way to reduce the repetition rate of the lasers without increasing the physical cavity length is to incorporate a slow light photonic crystal structure inside the lasers cavity. Such a laser cavity will have a group index that is much larger than the material refractive index thereby giving a longer optical path length for the same physical length of the device. The incorporation of the photonic crystal will also allow the possibility to do dispersion engineering within the laser cavity and to enable pulse compression. Both these effects can increase the two-photon excitation efficiency for TPM. In this work we highlight the design and progress towards the development of a monolithic semiconductor photonic crystal passively mode locked laser for two-photon microscopy.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Janjua, Altamash |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Harris, J. S. (James Stewart), 1942- |
| Thesis advisor | Harris, J. S. (James Stewart), 1942- |
| Thesis advisor | Fan, Shanhui, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Schnitzer, Mark Jacob, 1970- |
| Advisor | Fan, Shanhui, 1972- |
| Advisor | Schnitzer, Mark Jacob, 1970- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Altamash Janjua. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2012 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Altamash Janjua
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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