Optical injection locking at sub nano-watt powers.

We demonstrate optical injection locking (OIL) at record low injection power of -65  dBm using EDFA-based pre-amplification and an electrical phase locked loop (PLL). Investigating the phase noise characteristics of OIL, we find that at low injection powers the slave laser linewidth and injection ratio strongly influence the phase noise of the locked slave output. By introducing an EDFA pre-amplifier, the minimum locking power for OIL is reduced. Moreover, using this pre-amplifier we find that there exists an optimum injection power into the slave where the output phase noise is minimized and is below the phase noise without EDFA. We evaluate an OIL-based pump recovery in a phase sensitive amplifier (PSA) receiver system aimed at free-space communications.