Abstract

Much work has been done theoretically and experimentally on the study of chaos in nonlinear optical resonators. The major part of these works reports successive bifurcation phenomena of an oscillation with a single frequency, for example, period-doubling bifurcation and intermittency. In a nonlinear resonator, however, it is possible that a number of self-oscillations are excited simultaneously, and a competition between these oscillations provides a mechanism inducing optical chaos. We show two examples of such a mechanism.

© 1984 Optical Society of America