Abstract

Two plane waves interfering in a nonlinear optical Kerr medium, in one of the geometries shown in Fig. 1, were shown to display self-oscillations, period doubling and chaos as the light intensity is increased [1]. The system contains no external feedback in the form of an optical resonator, and its steady state solution is almost trivial, predicting no energy transfer between the two waves, and the light intensity emerging from the two ends of the system is the same as the incident intensity. Nevertheless, the time dependent behavior of the two waves beyond the instability threshold contains many of the interesting features usually found in more complicated optical systems. The interfering beam system is attractively simple, and it is presented here as a demonstration for the strength of a model suggested recently [2].

© 1985 Optical Society of America