Subharmonic Locking and Optical Frequency Combs in Short-Cavity Swept Semiconductor Lasers

Since their discovery, optical frequency combs have driven innovations in various fields ranging from telecommunications and metrology to spectroscopy, optical tomography and quantum science. For many applications, shaping the properties of optical combs based on nonlinear laser dynamics has become a central issue. On the other hand, laser swept sources have been extensively investigated and used in the context of optical coherence tomography and other applications. It has been shown that they may exhibit a rich variety of dynamical behaviors arising from the interplay of the system's nonlinearities with the swept time scale [1], [2].