Nonlinear dynamics in a circular-sided square microcavity laser

Abstract

Self-chaotic dual-mode and tri-mode microcavity lasers have been recently proposed and demonstrated for high-speed random number generation. Here, we report the characteristics of irregular pulse packages and self-chaos operation for a dual-mode circular-sided square microcavity laser. In addition to the mode interaction between the fundamental and first-order transverse modes, we observed irregular pulse packages due to the mode beating of near-degenerate modes for the first time to our best knowledge. Moreover, a successive route from periodic-one and periodic-three states to chaos is first experimentally illustrated by increasing injection current. The chaotic state is observed over a current range of 10 mA, and the maximum chaos effective bandwidth of 22.4 GHz is realized with a flatness of ±4  dB. Chaotic characteristics are also investigated for different longitudinal modes, which indicates that the self-chaotic microlaser can provide robust parallel chaotic outputs for practical application.