Dynamics of optical parametric oscillators

Optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) are promising tunable sources of coherent light, in particular for generating nonclassical states of light. As many nonlinear optical devices (e.g., lasers), OPOs can exhibit instabilities. However, their dynamics has so far been relatively little studied: although periodic and chaotic behavior have been predicted long ago to occur in continuous-wave OPOs, experimental self-pulsing regimes have been reported only recently. In recent work, we have observed and described several instability mechanisms leading to periodic behavior in cw OPOs.