Bifurcations in electrooptic bistable devices with short delay times in the feedback

We have investigated experimentally the behavior of a hybrid bistable electrooptic device with a delayed feedback when the delay time is comparable to the time constant of the device. The behavior is governed by a nonlinear difference-differential equation. The threshold of instability and the period of the oscillations observed close to threshold agree relatively well with the predictions obtained from a linear stability analysis of this equation. For larger input signals or feedback, bifurcations take place. We then observe period-2, period-4, and chaotic behavior following the period-doubling scheme of Feigenbaum. For delay times shorter than the time constant this bifurcation behavior can still be observed for large input signals. Furthermore, for such short delay times the threshold for onset of instabilities was observed to exhibit hysteresis, so different thresholds were observed when the input signal was increasing and decreasing.