We present a theoretical study of the nonlinear dynamics of a long external cavity delayed optical feedback-induced interband cascade laser (ICL). Using the modified Lang–Kobayashi equations, we numerically investigate the effects of some key parameters on the first Hopf bifurcation point of ICL with optical feedback, such as the delay time (τ_f), pump current (I), linewidth enhancement factor (LEF), stage number (m) and feedback strength (f_ext). It is found that compared with τ_f, I, LEF and m have a significant effect on the stability of the ICL. Additionally, our results show that an ICL with few stage numbers subjected to external cavity optical feedback is more susceptible to exhibiting chaos. The chaos bandwidth dependences on m, I and f_ext are investigated, and 8 GHz bandwidth mid-infrared chaos is observed.

In this study, we have proposed and numerically demonstrated that the bias current of a semiconductor laser cannot be used as a key for optical chaos communication, using external-cavity lasers. This is because the chaotic carrier has a signature of relaxation oscillation, whose period can be extracted by the first side peak of the carrier’s autocorrelation function. Then, the bias current can be approximately cracked, according to the well-known relationship between the bias current and relaxation period of a solitary laser. Our simulated results have shown that the cracked current eavesdropper could successfully crack an encrypted message, by means of a unidirectional locking injection or a bidirectional coupling. In addition, the cracked bias current was closer to the real value as the bias current increased, meaning that a large bias current brought a big risk to the security.

We propose a scheme for key-space-enhanced chaos secure communication using semiconductor lasers with spectrum-programmable optoelectronic feedback. This feedback consists of multiple parallel optoelectronic feedback loops composed of bandpass filters and radio-frequency amplifiers. The centre frequencies of the filters and gain coefficients of the amplifiers increase the key space. We use 12 parallel filtered feedback loops to analyse the effects of parameter mismatch on the synchronization quality. The simulation result indicates that the key space reaches approximately 2¹⁰⁰ at a data rate of 10 Gbit/s, and it can be further enhanced by increasing the number of feedback loops. These results suggest an alternative approach for security-enhanced optical chaos communication.

We propose a simple method to generate broadband polarization chaos using two mutually coupled free-running vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). Specifically, we quantitatively investigate the effect of critical external parameters (bias current, frequency detuning and coupling coefficient) on the polarization chaos bandwidth in the scenarios of parallel injection and orthogonal injection, and reveal the physical mechanism of bandwidth enhancement in two scenarios. Final simulation results show that the bandwidth of chaotic signals obtained from parallel and orthogonal injection can reach 35.15 GHz and 32.96 GHz, respectively.

We present a key-space-enhanced optical chaos secure communication scheme using a pair of integrated four-section semiconductor lasers as transceivers, which are commonly driven by a DFB laser with bidirectional injection. The transceiver consists of two DFB laser sections, which are mutually coupled through a passive phase section and an amplifier section. The center frequencies, bias currents, coupling rate, and phase shift of the integrated laser can be used as physical key parameters and thus enhance the dimension of key space. The numerical results show that a physical key space of about 2⁷⁰ is achieved with a data rate of 10 Gbit/s.

Terahertz (THz) noise sources play an irreplaceable role in testing THz devices and evaluating THz application systems, and the flatness of their radio frequency (RF) spectra is an important technical parameter. In this paper, a scheme for generating flat THz noise by mixing multiple filtered incoherent light fields is proposed. A theoretical analysis is conducted to investigate the impact of different spectral linewidths and central wavelength differences of incoherent light fields on the noise power and RF spectrum flatness, and an optimized experimental scheme is obtained. The results show that the proposed method can generate a 280–380 GHz flat THz noise signal with an RF spectrum flatness of ±0.5 dB in simulation and ±2.7 dB in our experiments. This article provides an excellent technical solution to the demand for flat THz noise in the THz field.