Experimental investigation of the light intensity statistics of semiconductor lasers

The photoelectron statistics for the total intensity and for the intensity of single isolated modes of several different semiconductor diode laser types have been measured in detail, and the photoelectron distributions are converted to intensity. The measured photoelectron distributions of the total intensity show only small deviations from ideal Gaussian noise, whereas extreme deviations from Gaussian behavior are shown by the photoelectron distributions of single isolated modes. Emission pattern dominating modes are characterized by a negative third moment, whereas side modes exhibit a positive third moment. This phenomenon is explained in terms of the strong noise modulation of the side modes. The moments of intensity distribution are presented in a momentratic plot, with most of the distributions lying in the vicinity of the gamma line. Beta and Ray-Bessel analytic distributions are fitted to the first four moments of the intensity, and the resulting distributions are fitted to a model proposed in the literature.