Experimental control of a fast chaotic time-delay opto-electronic device

The focus of this thesis is the experimental investigation of the dynamics and control of a new type of fast chaotic opto-electronic device: an active interferometer with electronic bandpass filtered delayed feedback displaying chaotic oscillations with a fundamental frequency as high as 100 MHz. To stabilize the system, I introduce a new form of delayed feedback control suitable for fast time-delay systems. The method provides a new tool for the fundamental study of fast dynamical systems as well as for technological exploitation of chaos.; The new opto-electronic device consists of a semiconductor laser, a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and an electronic feedback loop. The device offers a high degree of design flexibility at a much lower cost than other known sources of fast optical chaos. Both the nonlinearity and the timescale of the oscillations are easily manipulated experimentally. To characterize the dynamics of the system, I observe experimentally its behavior in the time and frequency domains as the feedback-loop gain is varied. The system displays a route to chaos that begins with a Hopf bifurcation from a steady state to a periodic oscillation at the so-called fundamental frequency. Further bifurcations give rise to a chaotic regime with a broad, flattened power spectrum. I develop a mathematical model of the device that shows very good agreement with the observed dynamics.; To control chaos in the device, I introduce a new control method suitable for fast time-delay systems, in particular. The method is a modification of a well known control approach called time-delay autosynchronization (TDAS) in which the control perturbation is formed by comparing the current value of a system variable to its value at a time in the past equal to the period of the orbit to be stabilized. The current state of a time-delay dynamical system retains a memory of the state of the system one feedback delay time in the past. As a result, the past state of the system can be used to predict the current state. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...