The Heisenberg limit to laser coherence $\mathfrak{C}$—the number of photons in the maximally populated mode of the laser beam—is the fourth power of the number of excitations inside the laser. We generalize the previous proof of this upper bound scaling by dropping the requirement that the beam photon statistics be Poissonian (i.e., Mandel’s $Q=0$). We then show that the relation between $\mathfrak{C}$ and sub-Poissonianity ($Q<0$) is win-win, not a tradeoff. For both regular (non-Markovian) pumping with semiunitary gain (which allows $Q\to -1$), and random (Markovian) pumping with optimized gain, $\mathfrak{C}$ is maximized when $Q$ is minimized.

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• Gain properties of lasers
• Lasers
• Masers
• Open quantum systems & decoherence
• Optical coherence
• Optics & lasers
• Quantum coherence & coherence measures
• Quantum optics