Abstract

Chaos synchronization has received considerable attention in the last fifteen years partly because of possible applications in chaos-based communications. In the field of optical communication, the synchronization of external- cavity edge-emitting laser diodes has been thoroughly studied and several synchronization regimes have been predicted, observed, and characterized. Very recently, a couple of numerical and experimental studies has shown that some form of synchronization is also possible in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) [1]. Compared to edge-emitters, VCSELs present an additional complexity due to weak polarization anisotropies which can lead to several peculiar behaviors arising from the competition between two possible linearly-polarized (LP) states of the light. How this polarization mode competion affects the synchronization of VCSELs is still an open question, which we try to address here.

© 2007 IEEE