Drift phenomena and analogy to mode-locked lasers in the dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with feedback

This study reports experimental results on the dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) in the presence of isotropic optical feedback in the long cavity regime, which are known to exhibit a variety of dynamical behaviours. Previously, the dynamics of VCSELs with polarized feedback was found to exhibit drift phenomena, which are also known to occur in other systems with feedback. In this paper, drift phenomena is shown to occur also for the case of isotropic feedback in the well known dynamical regimes of low-frequency fluctuations and coherence collapse.