Short THz pulse generation from a dispersion compensated modelocked quantum cascade laser

Dispersion compensation is vital for the generation of ultrashort and single cycle pulses from modelocked lasers across the electromagnetic spectrum. However, no such scheme have been successfully applied to terahertz (THz) quantum cascade lasers (QCL) for short and stable pulse generation in the THz range. Here we show a monolithic on-chip compensation scheme for a modelocked QCL, permitting THz pulses to be considerably shortened from 16ps to 4ps. This is based on the realization of a small coupled cavity resonator that acts as an 'off resonance' Gires-Tournois interferometer (GTI), permitting large THz spectral bandwidths to be compensated.