HOMOCLINIC ORBITS AND CHAOS IN A MULTIMODE LASER

We show experimentally that under certain conditions the chaotic inten sity dynamics of an optically pumped NH3 bidirectional ring laser coul d be well described in terms of Shil'nikov homoclinic orbits and chaos . We found that the mechanism that resulted in this kind of dynamics o f the laser is the competition between effects caused by the mode inte raction between the forward and the backward modes of the laser and by the intrinsic single-mode dynamics of the interacting modes. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.