INFLUENCE OF NOISE-INDUCED MODULATIONS ON THE TIMING STABILITY OF PASSIVELY MODE-LOCKED SEMICONDUCTOR LASER SUBJECT TO OPTICAL FEEDBACK

Abstract We show that passively mode-locked lasers, subject to feedback from a single external cavity can exhibit large timing fluctuations on short time scales, despite having a relatively small long-term timing jitter. This means that the commonly used von Linde and Kéfélian techniques of experimentally estimating the timing jitter can lead to large errors in the estimation of the arrival time of pulses. We also show that adding a second feedback cavity of the appropriate length can significantly suppress noise-induced modulations that are present in the single feedback system. This reduces the short time-scale fluctuations of the interspike interval time and, at the same time, improves the variance of the fluctuation of the pulse arrival times on long time scales.