A novel approach for generating flat optical frequency comb based on externally injected gain-switching distributed feedback semiconductor laser

In this paper, a novel approach for generating flat optical frequency comb (OFC) based on externally injected gain-switched distributed feedback (DFB) semiconductor laser is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the proposed system, the flatness, the number of OFC spectral lines, and the spectral line to background noise ratio can be tuned to their optimized values by adjusting the current of the modulation signal, the injection ratio and the detuning frequency. Since the frequency of the modulation signal decides the frequency spacing of the output spectral lines, OFC spectral lines of different spacing can be achieved. In the experiment, 10 spectral lines with 1.5 dB power variation are demonstrated to verify the proposed approach. In addition, the expansion of the spectral line is investigated.