International audienceA laser diode subject to a phase-conjugate optical feedback can exhibit rich nonlinear dynamics and chaos. We report here on two bifurcation mechanisms that appear when increasing the amount of light being fed back to the laser. First, we report on a full suppression of chaos from a crisis induced by a saddle-node bifurcation on self-pulsing, so-called external-cavity-mode solutions (ECMs). Second, the feedback-dependent torus and saddle-node bifurcations on ECMs may be responsible for large regions of bistability between ECMs of different and high (beyond gigahertz) frequencies

International audienceWe provide experimental evidence of super-harmonic self-pulsation in a laser diode with a phase-conjugate optical feedback (PCF), i.e., time-periodic nearly sinusoidal oscillating output power at a frequency being multiple of the external-cavity frequency that corresponds to the long-standing predictions of so-called “external-cavity mode” [G. P. Agrawal and J. T. Klaus, Opt. Lett. 16, 1325–1327 (1991)]. High-harmonic self-pulsations have been so far limited to configurations with long time-delay, hence to relatively small frequencies (<1–2 GHz). By contrast, the reported self-pulsating solutions from PCF are stable in a larger range of feedback strength and with higher-order harmonic number when decreasing the external-cavity time-delay

We report experimentally on extreme events in the pulsating dynamics of an optical time-delayed system, i.e., a diode laser subject to a phase-conjugate feedback. We study the effect of the feedback strength on extreme events' properties. We show a transition to non-Gaussian statistics of the pulse intensity and an increased number of extreme events as the mirror reflectivity increases. The extreme event pulse is anticipated and followed by smaller pulses with time-delay periodicity.