Experimental demonstration of 12.5  GHz wideband chaos in symmetric dual-port EDFRL

We study the dynamics of chaos in a dual-port erbium-doped fiber ring laser (EDFRL). The laser consists of two erbium-doped fibers, intracavity filters at 1549.32 nm, isolators, and couplers. At both ports, the laser transitions into the chaotic regime for pump currents greater than 100 mA via the period doubling route. We calculate the largest Lyapunov exponent using Rosenstein’s algorithm. We obtain positive values for the largest Lyapunov exponent (≈0.2≈0.2) for embedding dimensions 5, 7, 9, and 11 indicating chaos. We compute the power spectral density of the photocurrents at the output ports of the laser. We observe a bandwidth of 12.5 GHz at both ports. This ultra-wideband nature of chaos obtained has potential applications in high-speed random number generation and communication.