Noise and dynamics of stimulated Brillouin scattering microresonator lasers

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical and numerical investigation of noise, dynamics, and fundamental limits in stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) microresonator lasers, highlighting the potential for ultra-narrow linewidth operation.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled-mode formalism to analyze SBS laser noise and dynamics, identifying key parameters for low-noise operation and effects of pump noise.

Findings

Intrinsic linewidth can be below 1 Hz

Relaxation oscillation resonance affects phase and amplitude

Pump noise transfer can be minimized with stabilization

Abstract

We use theoretical analysis and numerical simulation to investigate the operation of a laser oscillating from gain supplied by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a microresonator. The interaction of the forward, backward, and density waves within the microresonator results in a set of coupled-mode equations describing both the laser's phase and amplitude evolution over time. Using this coupled-mode formalism, we investigate the performance of the SBS laser under noise perturbation and identify the fundamental parameters and their optimization to enable low-noise SBS operation. The intrinsic laser linewidth, which is primarily limited by incoherent thermal occupation of the density wave, can be of order hertz or below. Our analysis also determines the SBS laser's relaxation oscillation, which results from the coupling between the optical and density waves, and appears as a resonance in both the phase and amplitude quadratures. We further explore contributions of the pump noise to the SBS laser's performance, which we find under most circumstances to increase the SBS laser noise beyond its fundamental limits. By tightly stabilizing the pump laser onto the microcavity resonance, the transfer of pump noise is significantly reduced. Our analysis is both supported and extended through numerical simulations of the SBS laser.