Routes to Chaos in Passive All Optical Resonators Containing Molecular Gases
Robert G. Harrison, W. J. Firth, I. A. Al-Saidi +1 more
There has been considerable interest over the last few years in transitions to chaos in passive optically bistable systems. Ikeda1 showed in 1979 that an optically bistable ring resonator containing the simplest of nonlinear systems, a two-level media, can show a period doubling route to chaos. This was demonstrated by us2 using NH3 gas near resonantly pumped by pulsed CO2 laser radiation. More generally we identified and demonstrated the unique advantages of molecular gases in this field, providing in particular a vast range of laser-molecular coincidences together with control of response time, and therefore switching time and modulation frequency, by varying gas pressure. Subsequent extension of this work to all optical Fabry-Perot resonators revealed huge oscillatory effects3 leading to chaos in the transmitted laser signal. Under other parameter conditions for both NH3 and SF6 a rich variety of optically bistable effects were observed obtained in systems as small as 1 mm for SF64,5.
International Meeting on Instabilities and Dynamics of Lasers and Nonlinear Optical Systems•Jan 1, 1985•0 citations