Orbital Instability of Chaotic Laser Diode with Optical Injection and Electronically Applied Chaotic Signal

Abstract

We numerically studied the chaotic dynamics of a laser diode (LD) system with optical injection, where a chaotic signal, which is generated by an LD with optical feedback, is applied to the drive current of the master LD. To quantify the orbital instability of the slave LD, the Lyapunov exponent was calculated as a function of the optical injection ratio between the master and slave LDs and the optical feedback ratio of the applied signal. We found that the Lyapunov exponent was increased and the orbital instability was enhanced by applying a chaotic signal when the inherent system without the applied signal was in a “window”. Next, we investigated the orbital instability of the slave LD in terms of statistical and dynamical quantities of the applied chaotic signal. The maximal value of the Lyapunov exponent for a certain range of the injection ratio was calculated and we showed that a chaotic pulsation is suitable for enhancing the orbital instability of the LD system. We then investigated chaos synchronization between the LDs. It is concluded that the orbital instability of an LD with optical injection can be enhanced by applying chaotic pulsation without chaos synchronization.