Electro-optic delay oscillator with nonlocal nonlinearity: Optical phase dynamics, chaos, and synchronization

We demonstrate experimentally how nonlinear optical phase dynamics can be generated with an electro-optic delay oscillator. The presented architecture consists of a linear phase modulator, followed by a delay line, and a differential phase-shift keying demodulator (DPSK-d). The latter represents the nonlinear element of the oscillator effecting a nonlinear transformation. This nonlinearity is considered as nonlocal in time since it is ruled by an intrinsic differential delay, which is significantly greater than the typical phase variations. To study the effect of this specific nonlinearity, we characterize the dynamics in terms of the dependence of the relevant feedback gain parameter. Our results reveal the occurrence of regular GHz oscillations (approximately half of the DPSK-d free spectral range), as well as a pronounced broadband phase-chaotic dynamics. Beyond this, the observed dynamical phenomena offer potential for applications in the field of microwave photonics and, in particular, for the realization of novel chaos communication systems. High quality and broadband phase-chaos synchronization is also reported with an emitter-receiver pair of the setup.