Phase Shift Measurements Between Intensity and Frequency Modulations of a Self-Mixing Interferometer

We present a simple and straightforward method to determine the phase shift between the amplitude modulation (AM) and the frequency modulation (FM) of a laser diode. The approach is based on the measurement of AM and FM signals produced by the dynamical response of a laser diode exposed to weak optical feedback. The AM signal is measured directly on a photodiode detecting the emitted power, and the FM signal is demodulated to intensity modulation through the edge filtering techniques using: 1) a volumetric Bragg grating or 2) a Mach-Zehnder interferometer as filters prior to the signal detection. In this letter, we show experimentally that the phase shift determination unveils the linewidth enhancement factor of semiconductor lasers as predicted by the Lang and Kobayashi theory.