Bichromatic emission and coexisting multimode dynamics in Ring Lasers

Ring Lasers (RLs) present a large variety of dynamical regimes arising from the nonlinear interaction of the counter-propagating waves mediated by the active medium, e.g. bidirectional CW emission, oscillation regimes, mode-locking and chaos [1]. In addition, RLs with low degrees of backscattering present regimes of bistable unidirectional emission [2] which can be exploited for all-optical signal processing and storage [3]. Moreover, the bidirectional CW emission have immediate potential applications for the development of gyroscopes [4].