Abstract

Several work was done on the investigation and suppression of amplitude-noise in directly-pumped laser systems such as Nd:YAG lasers [1,2]. In this kind of laser the relative-intensity-noise (RIN) was originated by pump power fluctuations. On the contrary the RIN spectrum of codoped laser systems is less sensitive to pump RIN and therefore is more sensitive to other noise sources [3,4]. In fact in codoped laser systems pump fluctuations (PF) are filtered out by the energy-transfer process and the RIN spectrum may receive a significant contribution from intrinsic modulation of the photon cavity lifetime. In this paper we investigate both experimentally and theoretically RIN spectrum feature of microcavity (~1 mm length) codoped lasers and we analyze the relative weight of different amplitude noise sources. We shows that an intrinsic noise source dominates in microcavity codoped laser systems.

© 2001 EPS