Theoretical analysis of timing jitter in two-section passively mode-locked semiconductor lasers

Theoretical analysis of noise in mode-locked (ML) lasers was first performed by Haus and Mecozzi [1] using Haus master equation under the assumption of fast gain relaxation rate. Later this assumption was relaxed to describe mode-locking in semiconductor lasers [2]. In these works perturbation methods were applied to study analytically the effect of noise on the ML secant-shaped solitary pulse. Numerical methods of timing jitter estimation for more complex pulse shapes, which are based on simulations of travelling wave models [3,4] or delay differential equations (DDE) [5], are computationally intense and time consuming. Here we consider a DDE model for passively ML lasers [6], which can be considered as a generalization of the Haus master equation [7].