Abstract

The transition from regular static patterns observed in optical systems to spatio-temporal chaotic regimes is not yet well understood. We address this problem in a ring cavity filled with a nonlinear self-focusing Kerr medium pumped by an external field. In the mean-field approximation the transverse dynamics of the slowly varying electric field amplitude E is governed by a driven-damped nonlinear Schróedinger equation [1]: where θ is the cavity detuning. The homogeneous steady-state solution E_s becomes unstable if the pump intensity I₀ = |E₀|² is larger than a critical value I_cr (for θ = 1, I_cr = 0.5).

© 2000 IEEE