A continuous chimera state in an optical comb

摘要

A chimera state in a network of non-locally coupled oscillators occurs when some parts of the network are synchronized while the remaining parts are incoherent [1]. We show that a chimera state is observed in the optical comb generated by a passively mode locked quantum dot laser. This is experimentally demonstrated by means of optical linewidth measurements, phase recovery techniques and a bifurcation analysis and confirmed numerically by a delay-differential equation model showing excellent agreement with the experiment.