Abstract: In this paper, we report a theoretical and experimental study of the phase diffusion in a gain-switched single-mode semiconductor laser. Our modelling includes nonlinear dependencies of the carrier recombination rate and the semiconductor material gain on the carrier number. Also a comparison with the results obtained with linear models is performed. We focus on the below threshold operation, that is, the regime where most of the phase diffusion occurs in quantum random number generators based on the above mentioned system. Using the extracted parameters for our laser and simple analytical expressions for the laser linewidth, we show that logarithmic material gain and cubic carrier recombination dependence on the carrier number must be considered for a good agreement between experiments and theory. In this way we show that consideration of these nonlinearities is essential for obtaining a good quantitative description of the phase diffusion when using rate equations modelling.

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