Mechanism for reducing recovery time of optical nonlinearity in semiconductor laser amplifier

We propose and demonstrate a novel scheme to reduce the recovery time of optical nonlinearity in a semiconductor laser optical amplifier driven under a loss condition for the signal light pulse. Additional light, which is set at a transparency wavelength in the active layer, promotes stimulated recombination of excess carriers induced by the absorption of the signal light. This scheme excludes any additional carrier transport mechanism and nonradiative recombination and hence generation of heat. The principle of operation is experimentally verified by measuring time-domain transmission variance using a pump-probe method. A drastic reduction of the excess-carrier lifetime to less than 70 ps was confirmed.