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An analytical study of dynamical properties of a semiconductor laser with optical injection of arbitrary polarization is presented. It is shown that if the injected field is sufficiently weak, then the laser has nine equilibrium points; however, only one of them is stable. Even if the injected field is linearly polarized, six of the equilibrium points have a state of polarization that is elliptical. Dependence of the equilibrium points on the injected field is described, and it is shown that as the intensity of the injected field increases, the number of equilibrium points decreases, with only a single equilibrium point remaining for strong enough injected fields. As an application, a complex-valued optical neural network with working principle based on injection locking is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A semiconductor ring laser with a long cavity supports propagating localised structures with a chiral charge, named phase solitons. In this paper we study the dependence of the velocity and of the duration of the phase solitons on the characteristic time scales of the laser, namely the photon lifetime and the carrier lifetime. We show numerically that phase solitons are stable over a large range of those parameters and verify that the propagation velocity decreases linearly with the ratio of the carrier lifetime to the photon lifetime, while the duration is proportional to the ratio of the carrier lifetime to the cavity roundtrip time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A semiconductor ring laser with a long cavity supports propagating localised structures with a chiral charge, named phase solitons. In this paper we study the dependence of the velocity and of the duration of the phase solitons on the characteristic time scales of the laser, namely the photon lifetime and the carrier lifetime. We show numerically that phase solitons are stable over a large range of those parameters and verify that the propagation velocity decreases linearly with the ratio of the carrier lifetime to the photon lifetime, while the duration is proportional to the ratio of the carrier lifetime to the cavity roundtrip time.

Abstract: This report presents a modern approach to the theoretical and experimental study of complex nonlinear behavior of a semiconductor laser with optical injection—an example of a widely applied and technologically relevant forced nonlinear oscillator. We show that the careful bifurcation analysis of a rate equation model yields (i) a deeper understanding of already studied physical phenomena, and (ii) the discovery of new dynamical effects, such as multipulse excitability. Different instabilities, cascades of bifurcations, multistability, and sudden chaotic transitions, which are often viewed as independent, are in fact logically connected into a consistent web of bifurcations via special points called organizing centers. This theoretical bifurcation analysis has predictive power, which manifests itself in good agreement with experimental measurements over a wide range of parameters and diversity of dynamics. While it is dealing with the specific system of an optically injected laser, our work constitutes the state-of-the-art in the understanding and modeling of a nonlinear physical system in general. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We show how bifurcation theory and experimental measurements can be used hand-in-hand to analyse transitions to complicated dynamics in a semiconductor laser subject to optical injection. By a direct comparison of theoretical and experimental optical spectra we identify and explain the underlying dynamics in phase space. This is demonstrated with four distinct bifurcation transitions, including a transition near a saddle-node Hopf point and an intermittent transition to chaos. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]