Equations of motion from chaotic data: A driven optical fiber ring resonator

We apply a recently proposed method for the reconstruction of equations of motion from a time series to experimental chaotic optical data and find the theoretically expected Ikeda model. In contrast to phase space reconstruct ion methods, it is based on nonlinear regression and maximal correlation, a nd the resulting model can be investigated further. We demonstrate the retr ieval of physical parameters by calculating the experimentally not accessib le phase evolution of a non-stationary data set. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.