Competitive And Cooperative Dynamics In Photorefractive Optical Systems

Our purpose in this presentation is to discuss and demonstrate two multimode photorefractive systems. The first is a multimode ring oscillator with "winner-takes-all" dynamics. The oscillator has several (in our case five) possible stable steady state solutions. The state of the system can be switched with an injected signal. A slight modification of the resonator gives a system having no stable steady states; the modes of the system turn on then off in an ordered sequential pattern, looping continuously though the set of five modes. This is an optical manifestation of the "voter's paradox" in which a system of competing elements cannot come to a consensus.