Abstract
A tunnel junction is incorporated at the collector of a transistor laser to provide an effective method for voltage-controlled modulation via internal (intracavity) Franz-Keldysh photon-assisted tunneling. Electrical-optical signal mixing above threshold is made possible by the nonlinear coupling of the optical field to the base emitter-to-collector carrier transport and the base-to-collector electron tunneling. Microwave signal mixing with a common-emitter tunnel junction transistor laser is demonstrated with a pair of input sinusoidal signals: one (f1 =2.0 GHz) at the base using current modulation and the other (f2 =2.1 GHz) at the collector using voltage modulation, producing an optical output with harmonics of up to (4 f1 +7 f2) =22.7 GHz, despite being limited by amplifier bandwidth.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 101114 |
Journal | Applied Physics Letters |
Volume | 94 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2009 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)