Abstract
The statistical fluctuations in dye-laser transients are investigated when the laser is operated far above threshold. Exact analytic expressions for the mean, variance, and skewness of the first-passage-time distributions are presented when both additive and multiplicative white noise are included in two different single-mode laser models. These results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations of Zhu, Yu, and Roy [Phys. Rev. A 34, 4333 (1986)].