Effect of chirped gratings on reflective optical bistability in DFB semiconductor laser amplifiers

We use spatial chirp of the built-in grating to improve optical bistability on reflection from distributed feedback semiconductor laser amplifiers. We show that improvements in the on-off switching ratio occur because spatial chirp greatly affects the saturation behavior of the reflectivity resonances, allowing access to states of low reflection during bistable switching. We also show that spatial chirp modifies the spectral range of the variety of hysteresis shapes that occur on reflection, In doing so, we discover a new type of hysteresis loop that reveals a qualitative difference between the loop-shaped hystereses occurring near the two edges of the stop band. With spatial chirp, the new hysteresis loop can exhibit an on-off switching ratio in excess of 100 000.