A new mechanism of phase locking in a single-mode laser

We study the motion of the laser phase in presence of the noise-correlation identified in a recent work [Phys. Lett. A 260 (1999) 126]. The laser phase is found to be locked around a fixed value and this phase locking is induced by the correlation between Gamma(t), the noise of the macroscopic atomic dipole moment, and Gamma(z)(t), the noise of atomic inversion. Furthermore, when the laser operates from an intensity level I-0 < 1/A (A is the self-saturation coefficient) to a level I-0 > 1/A, the locked phase value phi(0) exhibits a discontinuity, jumping up a finite value pi, at I-0 = 1/A. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.