Wideband tunable laser phase noise reduction using single sideband modulation in an electro-optical feed-forward scheme

A wideband laser phase noise reduction scheme is introduced where the optical field of a laser is single sideband modulated with an electrical signal containing the discriminated phase noise of the laser. The proof-of-concept experiments on a commercially available 1549 nm distributed feedback laser show linewidth reduction from 7.5 MHz to 1.8 kHz without using large optical cavity resonators. This feed-forward scheme performs wideband phase noise cancellation independent of the light source and, as such, it is compatible with the original laser source tunability without requiring tunable optical components. By placing the proposed phase noise reduction system after a commercial tunable laser, a tunable coherent light source with kilohertz linewidth over a tuning range of 1530-1570 nm is demonstrated. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America