Abstract

Recently, research on the transverse effects in a nonlinear optical system has received much attention, but to date there has been little experimental investigation of the problem. In particular, there have been no reports on the phase-space behavior of the system as a function of different transverse distributions of the light field. In our research strange attractors in a cw laser arising from the transverse effects of the light field have been clearly observed by reconstructing the time-delayed and differential phase-space descriptions of the laser system, and the routes to chaos for the laser have also been observed with an rf spectrum analyzer. This laser is a single-longitudinal-mode, multiple- transverse-mode CO₂ laser.

© 1993 Optical Society of America