Role of pumping statistics and dynamics of atomic polarization in quantum fluctuations of laser sources

We solve the problem of a laser with variable pumping statistics for any relative magnitude of the atomic- and cavity-decay constants, and obtain a different regime of sub-Poissonian light generation. We show that, even for Poissonian pumping, the noise in the amplitude quadrature outside the cavity can be reduced up to 50% below the shot-noise level when the polarization but not the populations can be adiabatically eliminated. Maximum noise reduction in this case is obtained when the lower level decays much faster than the upper one and occurs at a frequency given by the geometrical mean of the decay rates of the field and the lower-level population. Furthermore, the full consideration of atomic memory effects leads to a generalization of previous results on regularly pumped lasers. We find that, for regular pumping, maximum amplitude-noise reduction (up to complete quieting) still occurs at zero frequency in all cases. However, a long-living polarizaton leads to an increase in amplitude noise and may even eliminate the dip at zero frequency, at the same time leading to a significant quenching of the laser linewidth in the bad-cavity limit.