Spectral technique for measuring the pulse-width jitter of a gain-switched laser

We report the experimental investigation of the harmonic number dependence of the noise power spectrum of a train of Gaussian pulses from a gain-switched semiconductor laser. In particular, we examined the dependence under the condition of tauomega > 1, where tau is the pulse-width and omega is the angular frequency. We demonstrated that: (a) the spectral noise function is fully described by a fourth order polynomial, (b) the pulse-width jitter is 5 ps, and (e) there is significant correlation between the different types of jitter (amplitude, timing, and width). (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.