Semiclassical theory of noise in semiconductor lasers - Part II

Abstract

A model of semiconductor laser noise is presented which includes the carrier density as a dynamical variable and the carrier density dependence of the refractive index. The Van der Pol laser noise model is shown to he a special case of this treatment. Expressions are calculated for all laser spectra and compared with their Van der Pol counterparts. The power fluctuations spectrum and the frequency fluctuations spectrum exhibit a resonance corresponding to the relaxation resonance and the field spectrum contains fine structure, similar to sidebands which result from harmonic frequency modulation of a carrier signal. The role of carrier noise in determining the field spectrum linewidth is also considered.