Abstract

Synchronously driven fiber cavities constitute a class of devices of growing interest. They can be found in practice as the basic elements of a large number of fiber-based devices such as the APM laser, the Raman laser or the modulation instability laser.¹ Their use have also been proposed for the development of passive soliton generator² and soliton memory.³ Although passive fiber cavities are conceptually simple devices, they exhibit a rich spectrum of complex behaviors. Several types of complex dynamical features have been described among which one finds: optical bistability, period doubling cascades, chaos, and polarization multistability and instabilities. The role of fiber dispersion in the cavity dynamics has recently attracted much attention and has been identified as being one of the crucial ingredients for the understanding of the fiber cavity dynamics.^4,5

© 1995 Optical Society of America