Pulse-shaping of gain-switched pulse from multimode laser diode using fiber Sagnac interferometer

We propose a pulse-tail elimination and pulse shortening method using an optical interferometer, which is effective for picosecond chirped pulses from gain-switched multimode laser diodes. In a numerical simulation, when the delay distance between a chirped pulse and its replica in an optical interferometer matches two times the round-trip optical length of the laser cavity, the pulse-front and -rear tail parts are effectively eliminated from the input chirped pulse after passing through the optical interferometer. Using this method with a fiber Sagnac interferometer, a 33 ps pulse with a long-tail emitted from a gain-switched 1540 nm multimode laser diode was linearly transformed into a 20 ps pulse with a substantially reduced tail.