Laser with injected signal: perturbation of an invariant circle

Abstract

We study the locked-unloked transition for a class of lasers with injected signal. The transition is produced by a parametric breaking of the invariant circle that represents the free running laser. A Hopf-saddle-node codimension two bifurcation coupled with a phase-drift re-injection mechanism organizes the flow. Fixed points (locked states), periodic orbits and tori, T 2, of two inequivalent types as well as hetero-homoclinic loops are found by using methods of bifurcation theory and are illustrated with computer simulations. We discuss the dependence of the flow patterns with respect to the laser parameters and, in particular, we show that the detuning between atomic and cavity frequencies plays a fundamental role for the dynamics.