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Physical Review A

Photon distributions of lasers with first-order phase-transition analogies

Rajarshi Roy

Published Nov 1, 1979• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The photon-number distributions for a laser with a saturable-absorber and a dye laser are obtained by extensions of the Scully and Lamb optical-maser theory. The results are shown to be in correspondence with those of Lugiato et al. for the saturable-absorber laser and with those of Schaefer and Willis for the dye laser. Moreover, they are in a form which clearly shows the relation between the saturable-absorber laser and the dye laser. The thermodynamic potentials for the first-order phase-transition analogy are calculated and are found to be of the form predicted by Scott, Sargent, and Cantrell using semiclassical equations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.20.2093

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Physical Review A•Jul 1, 1993•7 citations
The photon-number distributions for a laser with a saturable-absorber and a dye laser are obtained by extensions of the Scully and Lamb optical-maser theory. The results are shown to be in correspondence with those of Lugiato et al. for the saturable-absorber laser and with those of Schaefer and Willis for the dye laser. Moreover, they are in a form which clearly shows the relation between the saturable-absorber laser and the dye laser. The thermodynamic potentials for the first-order phase-transition analogy are calculated and are found to be of the form predicted by Scott, Sargent, and Cantrell using semiclassical equations.
The analogy of a laser with an autocatalytic chemical reaction is used to write down a macroscopic stochastic master equation of the birth-and-death type for the photon probability function in a semiclassical laser formalism. This equation may be solved exactly in the steady state using a generating function. This leads to a prescription for calculating all the higher-order moments of the photon number as well as providing a unique truncation of the hierarchy of moment equations at any given order. Further, the variance is given by a Poisson distribution, in agreement with the strong-signal Scully-Lamb theory. This master equation is also shown to lead to an exact Fokker-Planck equation by using a modified Kramers-Moyal expansion. A comparison between our results and the (microscopic) Scully-Lamb theory shows that the two approaches give the same results at large photon number.
Many quantum optical systems exhibit first-order phase transition analogy.1 Fluctuations of the optical field in such systems are due to spontaneous emission noise. The nature of these fluctuations for various systems has been discussed using various approaches. Fully quantum mechanical and Langevin equation treatments have been given for the dye laser2,3 and the laser with a saturable absorber (LSA) with homogeneously broadened media.2,4 For inhomogeneously broadened media, such treatments are either valid for low intensities or do not fully take into account the effect of quantum noise.5 In this contribution we present a fully quantum mechanical treatment for the LSA with an inhomogeneously broadened absorber using the Foch state representation of the density matrix.2,6
We arrive at transition probabilities for a laserlike system by neglecting wave properties of matter and radiation, and treating the problem, in an analogy to chemical systems, entirely in a number representation. Thus, for example, stimulated emission is idealized as a collision between a photon and an excited atom and the transition rate is proportional to the amount of each species present in the cavity. In all, transition probabilities for stimulated emission, absorption of radiation, cavity loss, atomic deexcitation (other than stimulated emission), and pumping of atoms are included in the model. The resulting stochastic master equation analogous to that employed for the discussion of fluctuations in chemical systems is then used to obtain the deterministic behavior of atoms and field. This agrees with that of the quantum mechanical laser model of Casagrande and Lugiato; thus the rate parameters of the stochastic model may be related to the parameters of their model. Returning to the master equation, we project out the atomic variable and use adiabatic elimination to arrive at a closed, single-variable equation for P(n), the probability of having n photons in the cavity. The stationary solution of this equation is obtained and graphs of (n) and log[(n2)/(n)2] versus the pumping parameter show close agreement with the microscopic results of the Casa-grande-Lugiato model. A similar discussion of the fluctuations can also be given for a laser with saturable absorption. It shows a first-order phase transition. A comparison with the microscopic results of Lugiato et al. is outlined. Again a remarkable agreement of the stochastic approach via the master equation and the microscopic theory is obtained.
The quantum-statistical properties of the optical field of a two-mode laser with two coupled transitions have been studied by means of a generalization of the Scully and Lamb theory. The photon number distribution and the mode intensity distribution are obtained in the steady state for a system of homogeneously broadened atoms in resonance with the laser field. It is shown that the mode-coupling constant $\ensuremath{\xi}$ is unity and that near threshold the results of earlier treatments are recovered. Furthermore, it is shown that certain limit measures for the relative intensity fluctuations predicted by the semiclassical Fokker-Planck treatments based on the third-order theory are valid even in the limit of arbitrarily high gain levels.
A unified colored-noise approximation is applied to calculate the stationary intensity probabilities of colored-gain-noise and colored-loss-noise models for dye lasers with saturation effects. We compare the results of the unified colored-noise approximation with the predictions of the best Fokker-Planck equation for the stationary intensity probability of a colored-gain-noise model, and find that the results of the unified colored-noise approximation agree better with simulation results than the results of the best Fokker-Planck equation. The first-order-like transition of colored-gain-noise and colored-loss-noise models with saturation effects is discussed and compared. It is found that the emergence of the first-order-like transition is related to the saturation element in the fluctuation term of the dye-laser model for white pump noise, and the occurrence of the first-order-like transition is only due to the existence of colored pump noise in the loss-noise models for dye lasers with saturation effects.