A tunnel junction is incorporated at the collector of a transistor laser to provide an effective method for voltage-controlled modulation via internal (intracavity) Franz–Keldysh photon-assisted tunneling. Electrical-optical signal mixing above threshold is made possible by the nonlinear coupling of the optical field to the base emitter-to-collector carrier transport and the base-to-collector electron tunneling. Microwave signal mixing with a common-emitter tunnel junction transistor laser is demonstrated with a pair of input sinusoidal signals: one (f1=2.0GHz) at the base using current modulation and the other (f2=2.1GHz) at the collector using voltage modulation, producing an optical output with harmonics of up to (4f1+7f2)=22.7GHz, despite being limited by amplifier bandwidth.

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