Generation of burst optical pulses from a gain-switched laser diode by CW laser light injection

摘要

The burst-mode pulsed lasers are finding extensive applications in material processing [1] and fluorescence imaging [2]. This is because that the burst-mode pulsed laser can reduce the thermal damage on targets by separating the single-shot pulse energy to burst pulses. For the generation of optical pulse bursts, the conventional way is to utilize external modulators to gate the high repetition rate seed pulses. A more cost-effective method is to use a directly modulated laser diode (LD) as the seed laser for burst mode operation, and this approach can remove external modulators [3]. However, in this method, properly-designed and high-speed electronic systems are needed to control the inter-burst and intra-burst repetition. In the present report, we demonstrate a novel method that can generate burst-mode optical pulses by a combination of gain-switching (GS) of an LD and continuous wave (CW) laser injection.