Buffer reservoir approach for cancellation of laser resonant noises.

The introduction of a buffer reservoir mechanism with optimized time-constants and cross sections in a laser system enables breaking any resonant exchange between the population inversion and photon population over an extremely wide bandwidth. The associated noise cancellation, including the excess noise at relaxation oscillations and spontaneous-signal beating, is experimentally evidenced up to 16 GHz in an Er,Yb laser comprising a GaAs two-photon absorber. Such approach is shown to preserve the laser linewidth quality and is advantageously implemented for optical distribution of frequency references.

Polarimetric imaging beyond the speckle grain scale.

We address an experimental Stokes imaging setup allowing one to explore the polarimetric properties of a speckle light field with spatial resolution well beyond the speckle grain scale. We detail how the various experimental difficulties inherent to such measurements can be overcome with a dedicated measurement protocol involving a careful speckle registration step. The setup and protocol are then validated on a metallic reference sample, and used to measure the state of polarization (SOP) of light in each pixel of highly resolved speckle patterns (>2000 pixels per speckle grain) resulting from the scattering of an incident coherent beam on samples exhibiting different polarimetric properties. Evolution of the SOP with spatial averaging and across adjacent speckle grains is eventually addressed.