Abstract

We report the experimental observation of deterministic chaos in the output intensities of counterpropagating laser beams as a result of their nonlinear interaction in a Brillouin-active material. Several workers predicted that counter- propagating waves of the same frequency could show instabilities¹ in a Brillouin-active medium and, for the case of relatively large Brillouin linewidth (i.e., the value of the ratio of the Brillouin. linewidth Γ to the Brillouin frequency shift Ω approximately equal to or greater than 0.3), the output intensities could show a period-doubling route to chaos.²

© 1991 Optical Society of America