Vertical stacking of InAs quantum dots for polarization-insensitive semiconductor optical amplifiers

Abstract

In this paper, we report a control of the polarization property in quantum dot semiconductor optical amplifiers (QD-SOAs) using vertically-stacked, electronically-coupled InAs/GaAs QDs grown by molecular beam epitaxy. By optimizing the number of stacked layers and intermediate GaAs thickness, the 9-stacked QDs demonstrated the polarization-insensitive operation within 1.2 dB in the 1.3-mm optical communication band. Our results demonstrate that the electronically-coupled QDs are useful to realize the polarization-insensitive QD-SOAs. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.