Autonomous Bursting in a Homoclinic System

The output of a dynamical system in a regime of homoclinic chaos transforms from a continuous train of irregularly spaced spikes to clusters of regularly spaced spikes with quiescent periods in between (bursting), provided a low frequency portion of the output is fed back. We provide experimental evidence of such an autonomous bursting by a ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ laser with feedback. The phenomena here presented are extremely robust against noise and display qualitative analogies with bursting phenomena in neurons.