Rajarshi Roy
Department of Physics
University of Maryland, College Park
Lasers can display qualitatively different types of chaotic dynamics for certain parameter regimes of operation. Simple control techniques have been applied to chaotic lasers with some success for specific types of dynamics. For other types of dynamics, a given control strategy may fall.
One may characterize the experimentally observed dynamics through time series analysis. The computation of the percentage of "false nearest neighors" gives a measure of the dimensionality of the dynamics. The Lyapunov spectrum is also computed from the experimental time series and compared with the results of numerical models. An important problem is to determine the influence of noise on the chaotic dynamics of the laser.