Physics and Applications of Laser Diode Chaos

An overview of chaos in laser diodes is provided which surveys experimental achievements in the area and explains the theory behind the phenomenon. The fundamental physics underpinning this behaviour and also the opportunities for harnessing laser diode chaos for potential applications are discussed. The availability and ease of operation of laser diodes, in a wide range of configurations, make them a convenient test-bed for exploring basic aspects of nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. It also makes them attractive for practical tasks, such as chaos-based secure communications and random number generation. Avenues for future research and development of chaotic laser diodes are also identified.Comment: Published in Nature Photonic

Deterministic polarization chaos from a laser diode

Fifty years after the invention of the laser diode and fourty years after the report of the butterfly effect - i.e. the unpredictability of deterministic chaos, it is said that a laser diode behaves like a damped nonlinear oscillator. Hence no chaos can be generated unless with additional forcing or parameter modulation. Here we report the first counter-example of a free-running laser diode generating chaos. The underlying physics is a nonlinear coupling between two elliptically polarized modes in a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. We identify chaos in experimental time-series and show theoretically the bifurcations leading to single- and double-scroll attractors with characteristics similar to Lorenz chaos. The reported polarization chaos resembles at first sight a noise-driven mode hopping but shows opposite statistical properties. Our findings open up new research areas that combine the high speed performances of microcavity lasers with controllable and integrated sources of optical chaos.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Continuous time crystal in an electron-nuclear spin system: stability and melting of periodic auto-oscillations

Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry in space, despite the invariance of the underlying energy function. This has triggered suggestions of time crystals analogously lifting translational invariance in time. Originally suggested for closed thermodynamic systems in equilibrium, no-go theorems prevent the existence of time crystals. Proposals for open systems out of equilibrium led to the observation of discrete time crystals subject to external periodic driving to which they respond with a sub-harmonic response. A continuous time crystal is an autonomous system that develops periodic auto-oscillations when exposed to a continuous, time-independent driving, as recently demonstrated for the density in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate with a crystal lifetime of a few ms. Here we demonstrate an ultra-robust continuous time crystal in the nonlinear electron-nuclear spin system of a tailored semiconductor with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals huge stability ranges of this time crystal, but allows one also to enter chaotic regimes, where aperiodic behavior appears corresponding to melting of the crystal. This novel phase of matter opens the possibility to study systems with nonlinear interactions in an unprecedented way.Comment: 12 figures, 17 page

Hybrid quantum-classical modeling of quantum dot devices

The design of electrically driven quantum dot devices for quantum optical applications asks for modeling approaches combining classical device physics with quantum mechanics. We connect the well-established fields of semi-classical semiconductor transport theory and the theory of open quantum systems to meet this requirement. By coupling the van Roosbroeck system with a quantum master equation in Lindblad form, we introduce a new hybrid quantum-classical modeling approach, which provides a comprehensive description of quantum dot devices on multiple scales: It enables the calculation of quantum optical figures of merit and the spatially resolved simulation of the current flow in realistic semiconductor device geometries in a unified way. We construct the interface between both theories in such a way, that the resulting hybrid system obeys the fundamental axioms of (non-)equilibrium thermodynamics. We show that our approach guarantees the conservation of charge, consistency with the thermodynamic equilibrium and the second law of thermodynamics. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by numerical simulations of an electrically driven single-photon source based on a single quantum dot in the stationary and transient operation regime

Spintronic reservoir computing without driving current or magnetic field

Recent studies have shown that nonlinear magnetization dynamics excited in nanostructured ferromagnets are applicable to brain-inspired computing such as physical reservoir computing. The previous works have utilized the magnetization dynamics driven by electric current and/or magnetic field. This work proposes a method to apply the magnetization dynamics driven by voltage control of magnetic anisotropy to physical reservoir computing, which will be preferable from the viewpoint of low-power consumption. The computational capabilities of benchmark tasks in single MTJ are evaluated by numerical simulation of the magnetization dynamics and found to be comparable to those of echo-state networks with more than 10 nodes.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Stochastic Effects in Physical Systems

A tutorial review is given of some developments and applications of stochastic processes from the point of view of the practicioner physicist. The index is the following: 1.- Introduction 2.- Stochastic Processes 3.- Transient Stochastic Dynamics 4.- Noise in Dynamical Systems 5.- Noise Effects in Spatially Extended Systems 6.- Fluctuations, Phase Transitions and Noise-Induced Transitions.Comment: 93 pages, 36 figures, LaTeX. To appear in Instabilities and Nonequilibrium Structures VI, E. Tirapegui and W. Zeller,eds. Kluwer Academi

Criticality and phase classification for quadratic open quantum many-body systems

We study the steady states of translation-invariant open quantum many-body systems governed by Lindblad master equations, where the Hamiltonian is quadratic in the ladder operators, and the Lindblad operators are either linear or quadratic and Hermitian. These systems are called quasi-free and quadratic, respectively. We find that steady states of one-dimensional systems with finite-range interactions necessarily have exponentially decaying Green's functions. For the quasi-free case without quadratic Lindblad operators, we show that fermionic systems with finite-range interactions are non-critical for any number of spatial dimensions and provide bounds on the correlation lengths. Quasi-free bosonic systems can be critical in $D>1$ dimensions. Lastly, we address the question of phase transitions in quadratic systems and find that, without symmetry constraints beyond invariance under single-particle basis and particle-hole transformations, all gapped Liouvillians belong to the same phase.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; the employed methods for the solution of quasi-free and quadratic open systems are described in arXiv:2112.0834