Numerical modelling of spontaneous emission in optical parametric amplifiers

Fiber optical parametric processes offer a wide range of applications including phase sensitive as well as phase insensitive amplification, wavelength conversion and signal regeneration. One of the difficult challenges is any of these applications is to predict their associated noise performance. However, it is well accepted that one contribution to the noise performance originates from vacuum fluctuations. In this work we show a novel approach to predict the spontaneous radiation from a parametric amplifier. In the approach the propagating fields are treated as a sum of a classical mean field and a perturbation defined from quantum optics relations.