Topological signature of deterministic chaos in short nonstationary signals from an optical parametric oscillator

摘要

Although deterministic chaos has been predicted to occur in the triplyresonant optical parametric oscillator (TROPO) fifteen years ago, experimentalevidence of chaotic behavior in this system has been lacking so far, in markedcontrast with most nonlinear systems, where chaos has been actively tracked andfound. This situation is probably linked to the high sensitivity of the TROPOto perturbations, which adversely affects stationary operation at high power.We report the experimental observation in this system of a burst of irregularbehavior of duration 80 microseconds. Although the system is highlynonstationary over this time interval, a topological analysis allows us toextract a clearcut signature of deterministic chaos from a time series segmentof only 9 base cycles (3 microseconds). This result suggests thatnonstationarity is not necessarily an obstacle to the characterization ofchaos.