WUHAN, China (April 19, 2013) - Wuhan Optoelectronics Forum No. 73 was successfully held in Auditorium A101 at Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) in the morning of April 19.
Optical devices based on vertical microcavities offer an easy access to optical signals, propagated either in free space or in optical fibres, which presents a serious advantage when cost-related packaging issues are considered.
In addition, vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers (also called semiconductor disk lasers) combine advantageous characteristics of solid state lasers and of semiconductor lasers, and therefore constitute an interesting approach for developing new compact laser sources. After a short state-of the-art review on vertical-cavity-based short pulse sources, I shall present some recent results obtained in our group for the generation of sub-ps optical pulses at 1.55 µm wavelength. This source relies on the association of an InP-based vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) and a GaAs-based semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM).
Dr. Jean-Louis Oudar graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1971 and received the Doctorate es-Science degree in Physics from the University of Paris in 1977. Since joining the Centre National dEtudes des Telecommunications (CNET), he has worked on nonlinear optical phenomena in condensed matter: studying the enhanced optical nonlinearities of organic compounds, he developed the basis of a molecular engineering approach for nonlinear organic materials, an internationally recognized pioneering work. In 1979 he spent a year as a visiting scientist at the Physics Department of Berkeley University, where he worked on new techniques of nonlinear spectroscopy based on four-wave mixing. Then at CNET and France Telecom R&D, his research has been conducted on the ultrafast dynamic nonlinearities of III-V semiconductor microstructures, quantum optics of microcavities, and the development of optical bistable and switching devices. In 2000, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Photonics and Nanostructures of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-LPN), where he has leaded the Photonic Devices for Telecommunications group. His present research interests include fast saturable absorber nanophotonic devices for all-optical regeneration, semiconductor light sources for optofluidic systems, short pulse generation and mode-locking phenomena in semiconductor lasers, including 1.55µm wavelength vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers.
