Abstract

In this work we analyse the process of generation and control of stable or chaotic soliton pulse trains in ultrashort pulse fiber lasers. We reveal the underlying low dimensional homoclinic structure of the nonlinear modulational instability (MI) in a cavity. The onset of spatiotemporal structures in physical systems may often be described in terms of reduced modal expansions which preserve the complexity of the original infinite dimensional model [1]. The advantage of such a reduction procedure is that the transition to chaos may be traced back to the universal bifurcation routes of finite dimensional dynamical systems.

© 1992 Optical Society of America