A New Method for Relative Intensity Noise (RIN) Measurement of a Laser
J. Hong, Y. Chen, J. Lei, S-M. Song, Y-Z. Yan and Z-L. Li
A new method for measuring the relative intensity noise (RIN) of a laser is proposed and verified by experiment in this paper. As an important module of microwave-photonic link (MPL), the RIN of a laser has contribution to systematic noises of MPL in the type of the intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD), so the phase noise of transmitted carrier would increase. This physical phenomenon is used to measure RIN of a laser and this method avoids the influence of near-dc noise and is unrestricted by the power of the laser compared with previous methods.
Keywords: Laser, relative intensity noise (RIN), microwave-photonic link (MPL), phase noise