Bifurcations to chaos in a semiconductor laser with phase-conjugate feedback

Due to possible applications, such as mode locking, phase locking, and frequency control, there has been considerable interest recently in the nonlinear dynamics of a semiconductor laser subject to phase-conjugate feedback (PCF). We present a detailed study of bifurcations to chaos involving tori in the system. This is made possible by the new numerical technique of computing what are called unstable manifolds of periodic orbits of saddle type, which we developed for this purpose. These manifolds are one-dimensional curves in a suitable Poincare section, and knowing them is tantamount to knowing the dynamics of the system