Excitability and coherence resonance in lasers with saturable absorber

We show that a laser with a saturable absorber, described by the Yamada model, displays excitability just below threshold. A small perturbation, for example, a small input pulse, can trigger a single high output pulse, after which the system relaxes back to the off state. In order to study possible applications, such as pulse reshaping and clock recovery, approximate expressions are given for the excitability threshold and the delay between input and output pulses. Under the influence of optical noise, the system displays coherence resonance: below threshold the laser produces pulse trains with minimal jitter for a particular optimal noise level. This all-optical coherence resonance allows direct experimental verification. [S1063-651X(99)02712-9].