Optoelectronic delay dynamics: from optical chaos communication to high purity microwave oscillators

Abstract

Nonlinear delay oscillators in optics have been first intensively studied in the context of chaos and nonlinear dynamics theory in the early 80s. Ten years later, they have been independently and nearly simultaneously explored in the context of two antagonistic applications: one is concerned by broadband spread spectrum optical chaos communications and the other dealt with ultra high spectral purity microwave oscillations. We report here on recent surprising results obtained while developing nonlinear dynamical stability analysis for each application, and considering the relevant quantitative differences between the two configurations of the same oscillator architectures.