Intensity noise statistics of GaAIAs lasers

Many groups1-3 have published theoretical and experimental studies of laser diode intensity noise, but none has reported the dependence of this noise on the photocurrent level. In this paper we show experimentally and theoretically that the photocur- rent noise power includes a term depending on photocurrent squared (l2p) in addition to the shot noise term proportional to lp. Furthermore, except near mode hops, this noise has Gaussian statistics.