A compact external cavity wavelength tunable laser without an intracavity etalon

We propose a novel external cavity wavelength tunable laser (ECTL) configuration without an etalon inside the cavity. ECTL consists only of a semiconductor optical amplifier with an integrated phase section, and a liquid crystal tunable mirror. We successfully demonstrated excellent performances of the ECTL with fiber coupled output power of more than 50 mW over a 40-nm tuning range, sidemode suppression ratio of better than 45 dB, relative intensity noise of better than -148 dB/Hz, and linewidth of narrower than 2.3 MHz