NEW MEASUREMENT SERVICE FOR RELATIVE INTENSITY NOISE OF LASERS.The demand for greater bandwidth in optical fiber communications has led to the development of laser transmitters and optical amplifiers with very low intensity noise. Transmitter noise is often specified by its relative intensity noise Relative intensity noise (RIN), describes the instability in the power level of a laser. The noise term is important to describe lasers used in fiber-optic communication and LIDAR remote sensing. , which also can be used to determine the noise figure of optical amplifiers. Because it can have a frequency dependence, the acronym RIN is used to denote the spectral density In statistical signal processing and physics, the spectral density, power spectral density, or energy spectral density is a positive real function of a frequency variable associated with a stationary stochastic process, or a deterministic function of time, which has of the relative intensity noise. To meet industry demands for precise measurement of RIN, NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. has developed a transfer standard for calibrating RIN measurement systems that employs electrical spectrum analyzers to resolve the spectral density of the RIN. This new measurement service has been reviewed and certified as a formal calibration service as well as a measurement assurance program (known as a MAP). Customers are offered the choice of using the transfer standard to calibrate To adjust or bring into balance. Scanners, CRTs and similar peripherals may require periodic adjustment. Unlike digital devices, the electronic components within these analog devices may change from their original specification. See color calibration and tweak. their own RIN system (a MAP) or sending their device to NIST for calibration. The transfer standard is an erbium-doped fiber amplifier that is coupled to a linear polarizer polarizer an appliance for polarizing light. and a narrow-band optical filter centered in the 1550 nm wavelength range. The device is characterized for frequencies between 0.1 GHz to 1.1 GHz. The spectral density of the RIN is stable and relatively constant to several tens of gigahertz One billion cycles per second. See GHz. (unit) GigaHertz - (GHz) Billions of cycles per second. The unit of frequency used to measure the clock rate of modern digital logic, including microprocessors. , rendering it suitable for calibrations at even greater bandwidths. The transfer standard has been verified by a combination of theory and measurement; its accuracy also has been confirmed using a laboratory RIN measurement system and a second RIN reference source. |
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