Stable injection locking with slotted Fabry–Perot lasers at 2 μm

Injection locking has many applications in telecommunications systems, such as narrowing linewidths, increasing bandwidth and improving filtering. Beyond telecommunications, injection locking is widely used in remote sensing. This is of particular interest for applications in the 2 μm region, where gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapour and methane have identifiable absorption features. In this paper, we demonstrate stable injection locking with slotted Fabry–Perot lasers in the 2 μm wavelength region. Injection locking was observed in both the optical domain and power spectrum; with key features recorded such as injection ‘pulling’, side-mode suppression and the characteristic quiet region in the electrical domain denoting single-frequency emission and stable locking. The effect of varying the injection ratio was investigated, with a decreased injection ratio corresponding to a reduction in the locking bandwidth. Finally, the lasers were shown to remain injection locked, with no thermal drift, for over 24 h, indicating their suitability for implementation in a real-world telecommunications system.