Discrete Cavity Dynamics in Free-Space Brillouin Laser
Highly coherent lasers are central to modern photonics. To date, high-coherence operation has been achieved predominantly in microcavity and fiber-based platforms. More recently, free-space Brillouin-laser experiments have revealed unusually strong noise suppression whose physical origin cannot be explained by conventional continuous-medium models developed for those platforms. In conventional continuous-medium models, the optical and acoustic fields are assumed to remain continuously coupled throughout the cavity evolution, whereas in free-space implementations the coupling is confined to the nonlinear medium and interrupted by passive propagation over the rest of the round trip. To describe this interaction-propagation separation, we develop a discrete-cavity model in which the short Brillouin interaction inside the gain medium and the subsequent free-space propagation are treated as two separate stages of the round-trip evolution. This separation introduces a temporal asymmetry between optical storage and acoustic relaxation, which effectively enhances acoustic damping at the cavity level and strongly reduces pump-noise transfer to the Stokes field. If the cavity round-trip time is much longer than the interaction time in the nonlinear medium, the noise-suppression ratio scales with the ratio of the total cavity length to the nonlinear-medium length. Our discrete-cavity model further provides quantitative predictions for the lasing threshold, output power, phase-noise transfer, and fundamental linewidth, in good agreement with experiment. These results identify the discrete interaction-propagation structure as the physical origin of the unusually strong noise suppression in free-space Brillouin lasers systems.