Title: Controlling Semiconductor Laser Dynamicsfor Advanced Applications

Speaker: Prof. Jia-Ming Liu (Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA90095, USA)

Time: 14:00 pm,June 14, 2013
Address: Salon Meeting Room, Institute of Semiconductors, CAS

Abstract: Besides their technological importance, semiconductor lasers are interesting dynamical systems. Multimode semiconductor lasers are well known to have complex dynamical behaviors due to mode competition under certain operating conditions. With a proper perturbation, even a single-mode semiconductor laser can exhibit highly complex dynamical characteristics ranging from stable, narrow-linewidth oscillation to broadband chaos. There are a number of approaches to invokingcomplex nonlinear dynamical behaviors of a single-mode semiconductor laser. The dynamical state of a given laser can be precisely controlled by properly adjusting the operational parameters of the laser. This ability to control the dynamical laser behavior, combined with the understanding of its characteristics, opens up the opportunity for a wide range of novel applications, such as bandwidth enhancement, chaotic communications, photonic microwave generation, chaotic radar, chaotic lidar, and dual-frequency radar/lidar. In this talk, the rich nonlinear dynamics of semiconductor lasers and our ability to control them for advanced novel applications are discussed.

Biography: Jia-Ming Liu is Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is alsoChair Professor of Photonics at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He received the B.S. in Electrophysics from National Chiao Tung University in 1975 and became a Licensed Professional Electrical Engineer in 1977. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, in 1979 and 1982, respectively. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo from 1982 to 1983 and was a senior member of the technical staff with GTE Laboratories from 1983 to 1986. He joined the faculty of the UCLA Electrical Engineering Department in 1986. Professor Liu's research interests covernonlinear optics, ultrafast optics, semiconductor lasers, photonic devices, optical wave propagation, nonlinear laser dynamics, chaotic communications, chaotic radar, optical imaging, biophotonics, and graphene photonics. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the IEEE, and the Guggenheim foundation.