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Acta Physica Polonica A

Two-Frequency Lasers: from Excess Quantum Noise to RF Photonics Applications

Mehdi Alouini, Fabien Bretenaker, M. Brunel, Dominique Chauvat, Olivier Émile, Ngoc Diep Lai, A. Le Floch, Guy Ropars, Marc Vallet

Published Jan 1, 2002• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Fra nce W e ill ustr ate the ph ysics of t wo-frequency lasers by two examples .T he Ùrst example illustrates the fun damental consequences of the existence of tw o eigenstates on the laser line w idth.W e indeed show exp erimentall y that the non-orthogonal ity of these tw o eigenstates results in an increase in the laser quantum noise.We also give a physical explanation of this vectorial excess noise factor.T he second example illu strates the capabili ti es of tw o-frequency lasers in terms of appli catio ns.I n the domain of R F frequency generation by optical means, w e show how a pulsed two-frequency source can be built for lidar-radar applic atio ns and pulsed RF frequency generation.

DOI
10.12693/aphyspola.101.7

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Fra nce W e ill ustr ate the ph ysics of t wo-frequency lasers by two examples .T he Ùrst example illustrates the fun damental consequences of the existence of tw o eigenstates on the laser line w idth.W e indeed show exp erimentall y that the non-orthogonal ity of these tw o eigenstates results in an increase in the laser quantum noise.We also give a physical explanation of this vectorial excess noise factor.T he second example illu strates the capabili ti es of tw o-frequency lasers in terms of appli catio ns.I n the domain of R F frequency generation by optical means, w e show how a pulsed two-frequency source can be built for lidar-radar applic atio ns and pulsed RF frequency generation.
The basic equations governing noise phenomena are derived from first principles and applied to examples in optical communications. Quantum noise arises from two sources, the momentum fluctuations of electrons at optical frequencies and the uncertainty-related fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Shot noise results from the beating of the noise sources with the signal field. In high-gain amplifiers, the spontaneous-emission noise dominates shot noise and results in a noise figure of at least 3 dB. It is shown explicitly how, at high power, both the laser field and the laser noise source become classical. The increase in noise in lasers with open cavities is not due to enhanced spontaneous emission as once thought, but to single-pass amplification. The noise fields and spontaneous currents have Gaussian distributions, while nonlasing modes have exponential photon-number distributions. Low-frequency intensity fluctuations arise from the electric current driving the laser and can be sub-Poissonian, in contrast to shot noise, which has a Poissonian distribution. The calculational tools are a wave equation for the field operator and a rate equation for the carrier-number operator, each containing spontaneous current noise sources. The correlation functions of these sources are determined by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. [S0034-6861(96)00503-X]
Quantum analysis has been done for the traveling-wave (TW) electro-optic phase modulator in the presence of the phase noise of a radio frequency (RF) oscillator and a laser source, in which the Hamiltonian for an active section of the phase modulator system is derived. The effect of RF phase noise from the oscillator and a phase velocity mismatch (PVM) between optical photons and the RF field are included in the Hamiltonian. The time evolution of the field operator of the laser in the TW electro-optic phase modulator is derived by the Heisenberg equation of motion. The action of a TW electro-optic phase modulator in the presence of the two distinct weak noises—classical phase noise because of RF and quantum phase noise caused by a laser—has been evaluated and explained in terms of the second-order temporal correlation function and power spectrum. The power spectrum has been written as a function of the semiconductor laser linewidth, an enhancement factor in the laser linewidth, and the RF oscillator linewidth. The results are applied to analyze the basic model of a frequency-coded quantum key distribution (FC-QKD) system. The quantum bit error rate (QBER), the first-order optical intensity correlation function, and the spectrum of intensity fluctuation have been calculated for the partially coherent regime to evaluate the performance of the FC-QKD system.
Quantum physics has brought enhanced capability in various sensing applications. Despite challenges from noise and loss in the radio-frequency (RF) domain, [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 150502 (2020)] demonstrates a route for enhanced RF-receiver empowered by quantum squeezing and entanglement. In this work, we further explore the quantum advantage of imaging in the weak coupling scenario of the RF-photonic receiver. The proposed imaging receiver applies transducer to upconvert the RF signal to optical to enable high-efficiency connection via low-loss fiber networks. The efficient connection therefore increases the synthetic aperture and improves the resolution of the distributed imaging system. To overcome the challenge from low transduction efficiency in existing devices limited by weak photon interaction, we propose the use of squeezed-state optical sources to suppress the noise. We numerically evaluate the quantum advantage in synthetic aperture radar imaging, where the images are generated from the standard resolution test chart via a Gaussian point spread function with added Gaussian noise. We apply the Wiener filter on the images to restore the objects and find that stronger squeezing significantly improves the quality of the restored image. Our findings push quantum squeezing advantage to real-world applications.