Abstract

Quiet driving of laser diodes has proved in the last decade to be an efficient and convenient way to produce light whose intensity noise is below the standard quantum limit. The pumping mechanism of semiconductor lasers allows a faithfull conversion of the electron statistics of the driving current to the photon statistics of the outgoing light. This simple picture does not however work for all laser diodes. For example, the importance of multimode effects on the noise behavior of laser diodes has been recently demonstrated for longitudinal, and polarization modes.

© 1998 IEEE