ROSSLER CHAOS IN OPTOTHERMAL BISTABLE DEVICES

It is experimentally shown that the reflected light of a high-contrast low-finesse Fabry-Perot etalon with a partially absorbing input mirro r and a trilayer spacer of alternatively opposite thermooptic material s exhibits dynamical oscillations that correspond to the folded chaoti c bands of the well-known Rossler model. A third-order system of equat ions is introduced to describe the response of the nonlinear device an d some numerical simulations are reported in good agreement with the e xperimental results.