Stochastic Differential Equation Model for Spontaneous Emission and Carrier Noise in Semiconductor Lasers

We present a new stochastic differential equation model for the spontaneous emission noise and carrier noise in semiconductor lasers. The correlations between these two types of noise have often been neglected in recent studies of the effects of the noise on the laser dynamics. However, the classic results of Henry show that the intensity noise and the carrier noise are strongly negatively correlated. Our model demonstrates how to properly account for these correlations since the corresponding diffusion coefficients agree exactly with those derived by Henry. We show that in fact in the correct model the spontaneous emission noise and the carrier noise are driven by the same Wiener processes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the nonzero correlation time of the physical noise affects the mean dynamics of both the electric field amplitude and the carrier number. We show that these are systematic corrections that can be described by additional drift terms in the model.