Laser Noise: Understanding Laser Line Width and Coherence

Description

This lecture delves into the concept of laser noise, focusing on laser line width, coherence, inverse phase, and amplitude noise. The instructor explains the importance of understanding laser noises for accurate measurements in amplitude and phase quadrature. The lecture covers random intensity noise, laser power fluctuations, variance, noise spectral density, and power spectral density calculations.

Official source

https://mediaspace.epfl.ch/media/0_gd03pavk

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Spectral density estimation

In statistical signal processing, the goal of spectral density estimation (SDE) or simply spectral estimation is to estimate the spectral density (also known as the power spectral density) of a signal from a sequence of time samples of the signal. Intuitively speaking, the spectral density characterizes the frequency content of the signal. One purpose of estimating the spectral density is to detect any periodicities in the data, by observing peaks at the frequencies corresponding to these periodicities.

Least-squares spectral analysis

Least-squares spectral analysis (LSSA) is a method of estimating a frequency spectrum based on a least-squares fit of sinusoids to data samples, similar to Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis, the most used spectral method in science, generally boosts long-periodic noise in the long and gapped records; LSSA mitigates such problems. Unlike in Fourier analysis, data need not be equally spaced to use LSSA.

Maximum entropy spectral estimation

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Fourier transform

In physics and mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is a transform that converts a function into a form that describes the frequencies present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex-valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both this complex-valued function and the mathematical operation. When a distinction needs to be made the Fourier transform is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function.