Abstract

We present a variety of four dimensional dynamical phenomena observed in the reflection of a very simple opto-thermal bistable device when illuminated by a cw laser beam. The system is a low-finesse high-contrast etalon with a partially absorbing input mirror and a quadrilayer spacer of different thermooptic materials. Dynamic complexity arises from competition among the contributions of the various layers to the interferometric phase shift and the effective dimension of the system is determined by the number of the spacing layers. Self-oscillations in the response of bilayer systems and two-frequency oscillations in trilayer devices have been already reported [1]. Homoclinic bifurcations involving saddle invariant sets of different configurations and producing either Shil’nikov-type attractors or Rössler chaotic bands have been observed in the trilayer case [1], The experimental results are well reproduced by numerical simulations derived either from PDE’s and ODE’s descriptions [2].

© 1996 IEEE