Laser pulse shaping technology based on semiconductor laser

Pulse shaping technique is of great significance for high power laser facility. In this paper, a new method used in laser pulse shaping system was proposed. An arbitrary waveform generator was fabricated to generate shaping electrical pulse. GaAs Field Effect Transistor (FET) has good ability of generating voltage-controlled current and on-off characteristic, while the semiconductor laser contains direct modulate characteristic. The unit-pulse was generated based on the on-off characteristic of GaAs FET, and then the arbitrary waveform electrical pulse was generated by stacking a set of unit-pulses. Impedance tapered micro-strip line was designed to maintain the consistency of each unit-pulse. The arbitrary waveform electrical pulse was used as shaping electrical pulse to modulate the semiconductor laser directly to realize the laser pulse shaping. With this method, a laser pulse waveform was generated with duration less than 10 ns, 330 ps time-domain adjustment. The experiment results show that the shaped laser pulse is determined only by shaping electrical pulse.