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

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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 τω>1, where τ is the pulse-width and ω 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 (c) there is significant correlation between the different types of jitter (amplitude, timing, and width).