Dynamics of optoelectronic oscillators with band-pass filter and laser nonlinearities: theory and experiment

In this paper, we present a study of a simplified optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) that features both the laser and the filter nonlinearities. We show that this optoelectronic oscillator depicts the phenomena of quasi-sinusoidal oscillations when the feedback gain is small, relaxation and chaos oscillations when the feedback gain increases. It is analytically confirmed that the frequencies of the limit-cycle oscillations increase with the cubic-nonlinear term and the feedback gain but decrease with the time-delay of the system. The experimental measurements are qualitatively in agreement with the theoretical and numerical analysis.