Ultrafast Tunable Photonic Integrated Extended-DBR Pockels Laser

Hybrid photonic integrated lasers have revolutionized laser technology by combining the scalable manufacturing of simple laser diodes with high-performance features such as frequency stability, opticallinewidth, and tuning linearity [1], traditionally only achievable with bulk cavity lasers. The integration of ferroelectric thin-film pho-tonic integrated circuits, such as lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) [2], has significantly enhanced the tuning speeds of hybrid integrated lasers and enabled on-chip second harmonic generation. Distributed Bragg gratings, a particularly promising architecture for hybrid integrated lasers, offer the advantage of not requiring high-Q optical microresonators while supporting high-power operation [3]. For the first time, we present an optimized hybrid integrated LNOI-based E-DBR laser with output power exceeding 15 mW, an unprecedented tuning range greater than 10 GHz with good linearity, and kHz-Ievellinewidth. This laser outperforms state-of-the-art DFB lasers in several metrics, enabling demonstrations of cm-resolution coherent ranging and HCN gas spectroscopy.