Theory of FM Clicks With Brownian Motion Phase Noise

Lasers used for coherent optical communication exhibit phase instabilities which are modeled by including a Brownian motion phase noise term on the carrier. We investigate the effect that this impairment has on limiter-discriminator detection of an FM signal received in additive Gaussian noise. For this, a new theory must be developed to calculate FM click rates, and prove them finite. Our talk concentrates on this aspect of the problem. No effects are found which would preclude use of such a detector with Brownian phase noise.