High-dimension chaotic attractors of a nonlinear ring cavity

The route to chaos found from the delay-differential rate equations is basically different from the subharmonic cascade which is generic of the adiabatic-following-approximation equation. The Lyapunov dimension of each chaotic attractor is found to increase linearly with γ${\mathrm{\tau }}_{\mathrm{R}}$, the ratio of the delay time to the medium lifetime. This clearly shows the invalidity of the difference-equation mapping whose dimension never exceeds 2.