Abstract

It is known that the so-called delay-induced instability in nonlinear optical systems can result in a large variety of multistable oscillation modes with hierarchical bifurcation to chaos. Particular implementations in opto-electronic circuits have been used to test the controllability of this phenomena.^1–3 In the parameter regime preceeding the onset of chaos, which we call the pre-chaos regime, oscillation signals corresponding to arbitrary binary sequences can be generated. It has been shown that these oscillation modes can be selectively excited by transient injection of binary optical pulse sequences.² It has also been shown that chaotic mode-transitions can be used to realise the novel function of automatic selection of an optimum output sequence.³ Such phenomena are potentially useful for a wide range of optical communication applications involving generation and memory of arbitrary optical bit sequences.

© 1995 IEEE