Intensity Noise Distribution of Semiconductor Lasers Measured Using Bit-Error-Rate Testers

Laser noise has been well studied both theoretically and experimentally. Most of the previous experimental work examined the standard deviation of the noise, with the implicit assumption of a Gaussian noise distribution. We employ a new approach to measure the semiconductor laser noise distribution down to a bit-error ratio (BER) of 10^-11. This method takes advantage of the high sampling rate of modern BER testers. We found that the noise distribution for a 1310-nm Fabry-Perot laser and a 1550-nm distributed-feedback laser are well fitted by Gaussian distributions