Route to chaos in an opto-electronic system

An optoelectronic nonlinear delay oscillator seeded by a pulsed laser source is reported. It produces a chaotic optical phase modulation, which can be modeled by a map. The setup is able to operate at high repetition rate with a differential phase modulation of optical pulses. It is intended for high speed digital data encryption at the physical layer using a chaotic optical carrier. Different possible behaviors are analyzed in terms of nonlinear dynamics.