Dark fringe operation and noise reduction with optical subtraction approach and power allocation

We demonstrate a technique to achieve the reduction of excess noise with dark fringe operation by optical subtraction and power allocation strategy. By performing the subtraction in optical way, the excess noise resulted from the photocurrent is eliminated and the phase information can be extracted with single photoreceiver. Meanwhile, by allocating more optical power to the probe beam, the DC background and the signal amplitude of the photocurrent become very small simultaneously so that the dark fringe operation is achieved. We compare the spectral distributions resulted from the proposed technique with that from the widely employed balanced detection and the modified balanced detection techniques which both are based on electronic subtraction. It is found that the experimental results closely agree to the theoretical predictions.