Ultrafast Tunable Photonic Integrated E-DBR Pockels Laser

The hybrid integration of III-V gain media with low-loss photonic integrated circuits has advanced the performance of laser systems in terms of laser stability and coherence. The advent of lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) photonics for self-injection locking and external cavities has allowed to increase in the frequency tuning rates of such lasers beyond the peta-hertz per second regime. Yet such lasers have up to now been difficult to operate and require complex photonic circuits and have only achieved low output powers. Here, we demonstrate a hybrid integrated frequency-agile laser based on an InP RSOA and an extended electro-optic Bragg waveguide reflector (E-DBR) manufactured with a wafer-scale lithium niobate-on-insulator process. The E-DBR laser can be tuned over 10 GHz with a tuning efficiency of more than 550 MHz/V with megahertz speed, and good linearity while featuring high optical output power of more than 10 mW and kilohertz linewidth.