Instabilities in quasiperiodic motion lead to intermittent large-intensity events in Zeeman laser

TL;DR

This paper investigates how instabilities in quasiperiodic motion within Zeeman lasers lead to intermittent large-intensity pulses, revealing new dynamical behaviors and statistical properties of these rare events.

Contribution

It identifies and analyzes a novel quasiperiodic intermittency route to large pulses in Zeeman lasers, expanding understanding of laser instabilities and rare event statistics.

Findings

Large-intensity pulses occur due to quasiperiodic intermittency.

Event heights follow a non-Gaussian distribution with heavy tails.

The study highlights a previously overlooked dynamical regime in laser systems.

Abstract

We report intermittent large-intensity pulses that originate in Zeeman laser due to instabilities in quasiperiodic motion, one route follows torus-doubling to chaos and another goes via quasiperiodic intermittency in response to variation in system parameters. The quasiperiodic breakdown route to chaos via torus-doubling is well known, however, the laser model shows intermittent large-intensity pulses for parameter variation beyond the chaotic regime. During quasiperiodic intermittency, the temporal evolution of the laser shows intermittent chaotic bursting episodes intermediate to the quasiperiodic motion instead of periodic motion as usually seen during the Pomeau-Manneville intermittency. The intermittent bursting appears as occasional large-intensity events. In particular, this quasiperiodic intermittency has not been given much attention so far from the dynamical system perspective, in general. In both the cases, the infrequent and recurrent large events show non-Gaussian probability distribution of event height extended beyond a significant threshold with a decaying probability confirming rare occurrence of large-intensity pulses.