Abstract

In this paper we consider the spontaneous emergence of organized behavior and spatiotemporal chaos in an array of coupled semiconductor lasers. In the absence of coupling, each laser in the array exhibits a constant, steady-state output intensity in response to a constant input pump current. For constant pump currents above lasing threshold, the individual lasers do not exhibit any interesting instabilities such as chaos. In the presence of coupling the constant steady state can lose its stability, and nontrivial spatiotemporal complexity results. The nature of spatio-temporal dynamics depends on the strength of the coupling between adjacent elements. For low coupling strengths the stable steady state is one in which the fields in adjacent elements have nearly equal amplitudes and a phase difference close to π. As the coupling is increased a Hopf bifurcation to a spatially ordered and temporally periodic output is obtained. Further increases in coupling strength lead to full spatiotemporal chaos.

© 1990 Optical Society of America