30 years of the quantum cascade laser.

It was January 1994, when the first quantum cascade laser (QCL) displayed laser action in Bell Laboratories. During these 30 years the QCL evolved incessantly, from a lab curiosity to the main on-chip source of coherent radiation in the Mid-IR and THz ranges. The journey has seen an impressive development of the QCL in several fields of laser physics and its applications, with a steady growth of research groups and companies worldwide.

Low-Loss Buried InGaAs/InP Integrated Waveguides in the Long-Wave Infrared.

In this work, we present a photonic integrated platform based on buried InGaAs waveguides with InP cladding that operates over a large mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectral range. Thanks to wet-etch fabrication patterning and Fe doping, low propagation losses below 1.2 dB/cm (0.

Impact of higher-order dispersion on frequency-modulated combs.

Frequency-modulated (FM) combs form spontaneously in free-running semiconductor lasers and possess a vast potential for spectroscopic applications. Despite recent progress in obtaining a conclusive theoretical description, experimental FM combs often exhibit non-ideal traits, which prevents their widespread use. Here we explain this by providing a clear theoretical and experimental study of the impact of the higher-order dispersion on FM combs.

Backscattering-Induced Dissipative Solitons in Ring Quantum Cascade Lasers.

Ring quantum cascade lasers have recently gained considerable attention, showing ultrastable frequency comb and soliton operation, thus opening a way to integrated spectrometers in the midinfrared and terahertz fingerprint regions. Thanks to a self-consistent Maxwell-Bloch model, we demonstrate, in excellent agreement with the experimental data, that a small but finite coupling between the counterpropagating waves arising from distributed backscattering is essential to stabilize the soliton solution.