Fluctuations and Noise in Photonics and Quantum Optics III

Derek Abbott, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Y. Yamamoto

P. Heszler

Leon W. Cohen

Philip Hemmer

James C. Camparo, P. Lambropoulos

We consider three-photon--one-photon phase control of resonance-enhanced photonioization with a phase-diffusion field. As is well known, control is achieved because excitation via the fundamental field interferes with excitation via the third harmonic field, and the form of the interference (i.e., constructive or destructive) depends on the relative phase difference between the two fields. In the problem, the stochastic nature of the field influences control because the propagation constant of a dispersive medium depends on the field's fluctuating frequency. Here, we approach the influence of laser phase noise on control via (i) a physically intuitive zeroth-order approximation, (ii) first-order perturbation theory, and (iii) numerical simulation. Our results show that first-order perturbation theory is not attractive for the study of this problem, since it requires the evaluation of very high order correlation functions associated with the fundamental field"s fluctuating frequency. More importantly, however, numerical simulation demonstrates that highly efficient control can be attained even in the presence of very large linewidth fields.

Sudhakar Prasad

Quantum fluctuations and squeezing of the signal field generated by a degenerate optical parametric oscillator are sensitive to the phase and amplitude fluctuations of the second-harmonic pump. The analysis reported here extends our previous calculations for a perfectly monochromatic noise-free pump to allow for finite pump amplitude and phase fluctuations. We treat the typically intense pump field with its fluctuations as a classical Gaussian stochastic process in two limits: first, when the pump has amplitude fluctuations but its phase is fixed and second, when its phase diffuses but its amplitude is fixed. Since pump amplitude noise affects the evolution of the signal field multiplicatively, it has a lesser impact on the quantum fluctuations of the signal than pump phase diffusion which compromises such fluctuations via the extreme phase sensitivity of the parametric amplification process. For the latter limit, our calculations extend the work of Gea-Banacloche and Zubairy [Phys. Rev. A 42, 1742 (1990)] to cavities with arbitrary transmission coefficients for the bounding mirrors.