Observation of nonlinear dynamics and transition to chaos in Photonic Integrated Circuits

Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) technology has revolutionized the application and fabrication of optoelectronic devices. Most affected by this development is the field of telecommunications, where both active and passive photonic devices are key components in the optical networks. PIC based optical components are cheaper to fabricate than their stand-alone counter parts, multifunctional, low energy consumers and much smaller in size. These qualities make PICs very attractive from a mass-integration point of view and they are generally viewed as the successors of electronic ICs. In this work we demonstrate that the nonlinear dynamics exhibited by the PICs are stable, well-classifiable from a bifurcational theoretical point of view and reproducible from batch-to-batch.