New route to optical chaos: Successive-subharmonic-oscil- lation cascade in a semiconductor laser coupled to an external cavity

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Abstract
Successive-subharmonic-oscillation cascade up to the fifth order followed by chaotic emission (parametric instability) is experimentally observed for the first time in an AlGaAs laser diode coupled to an external cavity. This phenomenon is attributed to the nonlinear interaction between the lasing and amplified-spontaneous-emission modes through the refractive-index dependence on carrier density in the active layer. Observed instabilities are successfully reproduced by the numerical simulations based on the generalized van der Pol equations including the asymmetric intermode interaction.