Abstract
Spontaneous emission is a fundamental source of noise in a laser. In most lasers, this quantum noise amounts to a level of “one photon per mode”, leading for instance to the well-known Schawlow-Townes limit to the laser linewidth. Recently, there has been much interest in excess quantum noise, which appears when the eigenmodes of the laser resonator become nonorthogonal1: the spontaneous emission noise has an apparent strength of “K photons in the lasing mode” in this case. The enhancement factor K can become quite large, K ≈ 500 has been demonstrated in recent experiments, and the possibility of K values larger than 104 has been predicted.2 This leads naturally to the question: what are the limitations to the concept of excess quantum noise?
© 1999 Optical Society of America
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