Noise of modelocked laser diodes

The noise of a passively mode locked laser diode (MLLD) can be described by five coupled linear differential equations driven by white noise sources. The amplitude noise and timing jitter were measured using nonstandard techniques due to the high rep-rate of our MLLD and compared to with the theory. The intensity fluctuations were about 7% and the pulse-to-pulse timing kicks were 43 fs. These results indicate that suppression of relaxation oscillations will be important for reducing the jitter of MLLDs.