Abstract

There has been considerable interest over the last few years in transitions to chaos in passive optically bistable systems. Ikeda¹ showed in 1979 that an optically bistable ring resonator containing the simplest of nonlinear systems, a two-level media, can show a period doubling route to chaos. This was demonstrated by us² using NH₃ gas near resonantly pumped by pulsed CO₂ laser radiation. More generally we identified and demonstrated the unique advantages of molecular gases in this field, providing in particular a vast range of laser-molecular coincidences together with control of response time, and therefore switching time and modulation frequency, by varying gas pressure. Subsequent extension of this work to all optical Fabry-Perot resonators revealed huge oscillatory effects³ leading to chaos in the transmitted laser signal. Under other parameter conditions for both NH₃ and SF₆ a rich variety of optically bistable effects were observed obtained in systems as small as 1 mm for SF₆^4,5.

© 1985 Optical Society of America