Abstract

The transition to spatiotemporal complexity in nonlinear optical systems has attracted wide interest during the last few years. One bifurcation scenario of interest is the transition from a temporally chaotic and spatially regular state to a chaotic state where the spatial regularity is lost. Such a situation is observed in stable resonator configurations that provide coexisting modes.¹ Another system that displays this transition is a ring resonator with a nonlinear medium, which produces a chaotic state consisting of two separate attractor regions in phase space.² Recently we considered this system extended in one transverse dimension and demonstrated that the spatial mixing and merging of the attractor bands causes spatiotemporally complex behavior.³ In this contribution we generalize our analysis to two transverse dimensions.

© 1994 IEEE