Synchronisation of chaotic self-pulsating laser diodes

Summary form only given. Considerable attention has been given to using chaos to implement secure optical communication systems. A message is encoded onto a chaotic carrier generated in a transmitter laser. Decoding of the message can be effected using a chaotic receiver if it is synchronised to the transmitter. In this work we show theoretically that synchronisation of two chaotic single mode self-pulsating laser diodes can be achieved. We consider both the multimode nature of these lasers and the effect of random spontaneous emission noise on the previously described synchronisation. The analysis is performed using a rate equation mode describing the dynamics of the carriers and the E-field of the optical mode.