Resonance enhancement of the four-wave mixing efficiency by injection locking in a fiber Bragg-grating-coupled semiconductor laser

Four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifiers has received considerable attention in recent years, both as a tool to study the high-speed dynamics of these devices, and because of its potential applications to wavelength conversion and all-optical switching. In order to optimize the performance of FWM-based devices, much effort has been devoted to improving the FWM conversion efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, we present a novel FWM configuration in which the converted signal frequency coincides with a mode of a subthreshold fiber Bragg-grating-coupled semiconductor laser, leading to an enhancement of the conversion efficiency of more than 20 dB.