Two methods of chaos control in a dynamic storage device which has been realized in an electro-optical bistable system pumped by a He-Ne laser are proposed. Experimental result agrees with the theoretical simulations and the Lyapunov exponent analysis. Up to 55 bits binary data storage have been successfully demonstrated.

We study the response of a hybrid bistable system with a delay in the feedback loop when the input intensity is modulated sinusoidally. As predicted in an earlier publication [J.Y. Gao and L.M. Narducci, Optics Comm. 58 (1986) 360], our experiments confirm the appearance of resonance phenomena, frequency locking and period doubling bifurcations upon varying the parameters of the modulation and the operating conditions of the hybrid device.

We analyze the instability conditions for the Ikeda model of a hybrid bistable system and study its behavior in a regime where the delay time of the feedback loop is comparable to or even smaller than the system's response time. The asymptotic behavior of the self-pulsing amplitude and of the critical slowing down in the vicinity of the instability threshold is consistent with that of other unstable systems described by a finite set of differential equations.

We consider the small-signal response of a rate-equation laser to modulation of the laser cavity length. To avoid nonlinear resonances in modulators and power supplies, we demonstrate that one can hold the modulation frequency and amplitude fixed while varying the cavity detuning to change the resonant response of the laser to modulation, and thereby one can extract the relaxation oscillation frequency and the damping rate of those oscillations. This technique permits a careful study of the relaxation parameters of the laser that govern small oscillations and thereby permits discrimination among several different models recently proposed to describe CO2 laser dynamics. We demonstrate this method of analysis by applying it to such a laser experimentally with the result that the simple rate-equation model is shown to fail while the more complex vibro-rotational model satisfactorily describes the results.

We study the dynamical response of a hybrid bistable system with a delay in the feedback loop when the input intensity undergoes a simple sinusoidal modulation. As a function of the driving frequency and modulation depth, we predict the appearance of frequency-locking phenomena and period-doubling bifurcations into chaos.