Multistability in optically injected semiconductor lasers

Summary form only given. Monochromatic optical injection in a semiconductor laser has received extensive attention during the last two decades. Nevertheless, many properties concerning its dynamics are still unrevealed and far from being well understood. We have used advanced techniques from bifurcation theory to explore new regions of coexistence of different modes of operation (attractors). Our approach is different from the usual one. We detect and follow bifurcations of attractors and repellers (as they may become attractors) in the (K,/spl omega/)-plane, where K is the injected field strength and /spl omega/ is the detuning from the free-running laser resonant frequency. Thus we find bifurcations of stationary points (saddle-node and Hopf) and limit cycles (period-doubling, torus and saddle-node of limit cycle). The main bifurcations leading to multistability in our system are the saddle-node of the limit cycle bifurcation and the torus bifurcation. We have identified regions in parameter space where several attractors like stationary points, periodic orbits, quasiperiodic and chaotic oscillations coexist. This opens new possibilities for optical switching between many different outputs of the laser.