Pulse-to-pulse jitter measurement by photon correlation in high-β lasers

The turn-on delay jitter in pulsed lasers in which a large fraction (β) of spontaneous emission is channeled into the lasing mode is measured by use of a photon correlation technique. This jitter is found to significantly increase with β, reaching values of the order of the pulse width at threshold. This is due to the increase in the relative value of the discretization noise when the number of photons at threshold becomes small, as is the case in high-β lasers.