Analysis of chaotic behavior in an optical microresonator

In this paper, for the first time, chaotic behavior of a classical moving-mirror Fabry–Perot cavity is obtained by finding numerical solution of a system of delay differential equations (previously obtained by a phenomenological approach (T. Carmon, M. C. Cross, K. J. Vahala, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 167203)). Fourier transform of the electromagnetic power for different values of pump power is calculated. By increasing the power, a period-doubling route to chaos is observed.Since the quality factor of the cavity has an important role in the chaotic behavior, variation of Lyapunov exponent and threshold power for the onset of chaos versus quality factor are investigated. A near linear dependence of the threshold power (measured in miliwatts) to quality factor is obtained. These results may be exploited in experiments on microresonators to determine the degree and the domain of the chaotic behavior of the system.