Semiconductor Lasers ― Stability, Instability and Chaos

This book describes the fascinating recent advances made concerning the chaos, stability and instability of semiconductor lasers, and discusses their applications and future prospects in detail. It emphasizes the dynamics in semiconductor lasers by optical and electronic feedback, optical injection, and injection current modulation. Applications of semiconductor laser chaos, control and noise, and semiconductor lasers are also demonstrated.

Semiconductor lasers with new structures, such as vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers and broad-area semiconductor lasers, are intriguing and promising devices. Current topics include fast physical number generation using chaotic semiconductor lasers for secure communication, development of chaos, quantum-dot semiconductor lasers and quantum-cascade semiconductor lasers, and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers.

This fourth edition has been significantly expanded to reflect the latest developments. The fundamental theory of laser chaos and the chaotic dynamics in semiconductor lasers are discussed, but also for example the method of self-mixing interferometry in quantum-cascade lasers, which is indispensable in practical applications.

Further, this edition covers chaos synchronization between two lasers and the application to secure optical communications. Another new topic is the consistency and synchronization property of many coupled semiconductor lasers in connection with the analogy of the dynamics between synaptic neurons and chaotic semiconductor lasers, which are compatible nonlinear dynamic elements. In particular, zero-lag synchronization between distant neurons plays a crucial role for information processing in the brain. Lastly, the book presents an application of the consistency and synchronization property in chaotic semiconductor lasers, namely a type of neuro-inspired information processing referred to as reservoir computing. 

Junji Ohtsubo received the B.S. degree in electronics from the Kyushu Institute of Technology in 1973, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics from Hokkaido University in 1975 and 1978, respectively. In 1978, he joined the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, MITI, Japan. During 1981–1982, he was a Research Associate at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester. He joined Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan, as an Associate Professor in 1985 and was a Professor at the Department of Systems Engineering from 1993. He is now a Professor Emeritus of Shizuoka Univeristy. His current research interests are nonlinear dynamics in optics, chaos in semiconductor lasers, optical information processing and computing, optical security systems, statistical optics, speckle, and optical metrology.

Prof. Ohtsubo is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and a member of IEEE, SPIE, ASP, the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, the Optical Society of Japan, and the Laser Society of Japan.