
2
II. LASER NOISE ANALYSIS
The self-heterodyne interferometer is a powerful tool
for characterizing laser noise [17]. In a typical arrange-
ment, the heterodyne circuit outputs a current I(t) (or
normalized current i(t), as defined below) containing the
noise signal. The resulting power spectral density, Si(f),
provides a convenient proxy for laser field and frequency
fluctuations, SE(f) and Sδν (f), although the correspon-
dence is not one-to-one. In this section, we derive these
three functions and show how they are related, focusing
on the regime of weak frequency noise. While many of
the results in this section have been obtained previously,
we re-derive them here to establish a common framework
and notation. We then apply our results to two types of
noise affecting atomic qubit experiments: white noise and
servo bumps. This analysis forms the starting point for
the master equation calculations that follow.
The Rabi oscillations of a qubit are driven by a classical
laser field, which we define as
E(t) = ˆ
eE0(t)
2e−ı[2πνt+φ(t)] + c.c.,(1)
where c.c. stands for complex conjugate. Here we assume
the polarization vector ˆ
eand E0may be complex. Fluc-
tuations of the laser field are a significant source of deco-
herence in current atomic qubit experiments, and are the
focus of the present work. The fluctuations may occur in
any of the field parameters, ˆ
e,E0, or φ, where the latter
is the phase of the drive. For lasers of interest, the fluctu-
ations predominantly occur in the phase and amplitude
variables. In this work, we therefore ignore noise in the
polarization vector and focus on the fluctuations of φ(t).
The effect of relative intensity noise (RIN), where the in-
tensity is proportional to |E0(t)|2is considered briefly in
Sec. VII.
Phase fluctuations may alternatively be analyzed in
terms of fluctuations of the frequency, ν(t) = ν0+δν(t),
which are related to phase fluctuations through the rela-
tion
φ(t) = Zt0+t
t0
2πδν(t0)dt0,(2)
where t0is a reference time. The fluctuations of δν(t) [or
φ(t)] have a direct influence on the Rabi oscillations, and
must therefore be carefully characterized.
A compact description of a general fluctuating variable
X(t) is given by its autocorrelation function. Making
use of the ergodic theorem, we can equate ensemble and
time averages to obtain the following definition for the
autocorrelation function:
RX(τ) = hX(t)X∗(t+τ)i
≡lim
T→∞
1
2TZT
−T
X(t)X∗(t+τ)dt. (3)
Throughout this work, we will only consider random vari-
ables, X(t), that are wide-sense stationary.
According to the Wiener-Khintchine theorem, the au-
tocorrelation function of X(t) is related to its noise power
spectrum by the Fourier transform,
SX(f) = Z∞
−∞
RX(τ)e−i2πf τ dτ, (4)
and its inverse transform,
RX(τ) = Z∞
−∞
SX(f)ei2πf τ df, (5)
where in this work, we only consider two-sided power
spectra.
The main goal of this work is to characterize the noise
spectrum of E(t). However, SE(f) (also called the laser
lineshape) cannot be measured directly, due to the high
frequency of the carrier. We must therefore transduce the
power spectrum to lower frequencies. Here, we consider
the self-heterodyne transduction technique, in which the
laser field is split, delayed, and recombined to perform in-
terferometric measurements. The resulting signal is read
out as a photocurrent containing a direct imprint of the
underlying noise spectrum. For the dimensionless pho-
tocurrent i(t), which we define below, the self-heterodyne
power spectrum is denoted Si(f).
In this section, we derive the interrelated power spec-
tra of SE(f) and Si(f), which are in turn functions of
the underlying noise spectrum Sδν (f) [or Sφ(f)]. To per-
form noisy gate simulations, as discussed in later sections,
one would like to use actual self-heterodyne experimen-
tal data to characterize the underlying noise spectra. In
principle, such a deconvolution cannot be implemented
exactly [18]. However, we will show that reliable results
for the noise power may indeed be obtained, particularly
for lasers with very low noise levels, such as the locked
and filtered lasers used in recent qubit experiments.
A. Laser Lineshape
The autocorrelation function for the laser field is de-
fined as [18, 19]
RE(τ) = hE(t)E(t+τ)i,(6)
where we note that E(t) is the real, scalar amplitude
of E(t). This function contains information about both
the carrier signal, centered at frequency ν0, and the fluc-
tuations, which are typically observed as a fundamental
broadening of the carrier peak. Additional features of im-
portance for qubit experiments include structures away
from the peak that may be caused by the laser locking
and filtering circuitry, such as the “servo bump”, dis-
cussed in detail below.
The time average in Eq. (6) has been evaluated by
a number of authors. For completeness, we summarize
these derivations here, following the approach of Ref. [19].
Let us begin by assuming the noise process is strongly