Measurements of laser excess photon noise

Jungsang Kim, Seema Somani, Y. Yamamoto

Miguel Orszag, J. C. Retamal

P. P. Gostev, Sergey A Magnitskiy, A. S. Chirkin

We propose a method to determine photon-number statistics of excess noise in laser radiation from measured photocounting statistics. The method based on the multi-objective optimization approach is applied to blind deconvolution problem to determine excess noise distribution from the convolution of this one and Poisson photon-number distribution of laser radiation.

Georgios Roumpos, Steven T. Cundiff

We use balanced homodyne detection to characterize light from a diode laser as it crosses the threshold. We measure the single-time second-order correlation function g(2), and also extract the photon number distribution. Just above the laser threshold, we find that the measured g(2) exceeds the prediction of the semiclassical single-mode laser model. From the reconstructed photon number distributions, we conclude that this excess is due to emission from nonlasing modes. For higher pumping current, the light noise increases due to a different mechanism, possibly mode competition or mode partition noise.

Jacques Arnaud

M. Lax, W. H. Louisell