Effect of optical pumping to the wetting layer and excited state on the gain dynamics of QD-VCSOA: An equivalent circuit approach

This paper investigates the gain dynamics of quantum dot vertical cavity semiconductor optical amplifier (QD-VCSOA) under optical pumping to the wetting layer (WL) and excited state (ES). An equivalent circuit model is developed for analysis of the device characteristics based on the standard rate equations (RE). It is shown that under the WL pumping operation, not only more gain and saturation values are available, but also a faster gain recovery dynamics can be achieved.