Abstract

Self-organized collective behaviors in multimode lasers attracted a renewed interest in laser dynamics. A good example is an antiphase dynamics, in which an individual mode contains N relaxation oscillations frequencies f₁ > f₂ > … > f_N (N: number of modes), while the total intensity exhibits a unique single relaxation oscillation at f₁ just like a single mode laser. This behavior has been found to arise from a dynamical equipartition of population inversion which parallels the vanishing gain circulation rule in globally coupled lasers [1]. Recently. 2^N − 1 different periodic oscillations have been obtained experimentally in a microchip N-mode laser by different combinations of modulations at multiple relaxation oscillation frequencies and application of mode-dependent periodic oscillations to general ion of dynamic spatial patterns is demonstrated using a shear-plate interferometer [2].

© 1996 IEEE