Experimental Verification of Regenerative Pulsations and Chaos

Experiments are described which verify the basic principles of regenerative pulsations and the Ikeda instability. The regenerative pulsations of an intrinsic optical bistable device resemble those we obtain from a noise-free computer simulation. The agreement improves when the pulsation frequency is much lower than that of the laser noise. Bifurcations up to period-8 and various paths to chaos are seen in a hybrid optical experiment, consistent with the theoretical predictions including real noise levels. A test for distinguishing a chaotic system from one that is simply noisy is outlined. Finally, we describe the apparent observation of instabilities and chaos in an intrinsic cavity-less bistable device.