Statistical physics of power fluctuations in mode locked lasers

Abstract

We present an analysis of the power fluctuations in the statistical steady state of a passively mode locked laser. We use statistical light-mode theory to map this problem to that of fluctuations in a reference equilibrium statistical physics problem, and in this way study the fluctuations non-perturbatively. The power fluctuations, being non-critical, are Gaussian and proportional in amplitude to the inverse square root of the number of degrees of freedom. We calculate explicit analytic expressions for the covariance matrix of the overall, pulse and cw power variables, providing complete information on the single-time power distribution in the laser, and derive a set of fluctuation-dissipation relations between them and the susceptibilities of the steady-state quantities.

7 pages, 1 figure, RevTeX

References in corpus (5)

• Glassy behavior of light
• Critical Behavior of Light
• Formation and annihilation of laser light pulse quanta in thermodynamic-like pathway
• Solution of a statistical mechanics model for pulse formation in lasers
• The quantum-limited comb lineshape of a mode-locked laser: Fundamental limits on frequency uncertainty