Abstract

Checks of homoclinic chaos made with nonlinear analysis techniques have been performed on the signals coming from a CO₂ laser containing CH₃I as a saturable absorber. The one-dimensional return maps of the regimes appearing inside the alternating periodic chaotic sequence are typical of homoclinic chaos. Numerical simulations give results in good agreement with the experimental observations. In the case of a fast absorber, a homoclinic tangency to a cycle created in a suberitical Hopf bifurcation is seen to be responsible for the homo-clinic behavior observed in the model.

© 1991 Optical Society of America

Instabilities and chaos in an infrared laser with saturable absorber: experiments and vibrorotational model

Ferdinando de Tomasi, Daniel Hennequin, Bruno Zambon, and Ennio Arimondo
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6(1) 45-57 (1989)

Frequency tuning of homoclinic chaos in an infrared laser with an osmium tetroxide intracavity saturable absorber

P. Alcantara, L. Guidoni, A. Barsella, A. Fioretti, and E. Arimondo
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12(7) 1326-1333 (1995)

Homoclinic orbits and chaos in a multimode laser

D. Y. Tang and N. R. Heckenberg
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 14(11) 2930-2935 (1997)

Homoclinic orbits and chaos in the vibronic short-cavity standing-wave alexandrite laser

W. Gadomski and B. Ratajska-Gadomska
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 17(2) 188-197 (2000)

Laser with feedback: an optical implementation of competing instabilities, Shil’nikov chaos, and transient fluctuation enhancement

F. T. Arecchi, W. Gadomski, A. Lapucci, H. Mancini, R. Meucci, and J. A. Roversi
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 5(5) 1153-1159 (1988)