Relative intensity noise in cascaded-Raman fiber lasers

Pump-to-Stokes and Stokes-to-Stokes relative intensity noise (RIN) transfer is discovered now for cascaded Raman fiber lasers (RFLs) with multimode laser pumping. We report on the first experimental study of this effect observed with two-stage phosphosilicate RFL and also propose its analytical explanation. It is shown that the peaks of radio-frequency (RF) spectrum associated with longitudinal mode beating in the pump laser cavity almost uniformly transfer to the first and second Stokes RF-spectra, thus increasing RIN of the RFL in megahertz-frequency domain.