Dynamics of Wideband Time-Delayed Optoelectronic Oscillators With Nonlinear Filters

We present a theoretical and experimental study of an optoelectronic oscillator featuring a cubic-nonlinear filter in the feedback loop. In this architecture, the nonlinearity introduces an additional timescale that leads to the emergence of complex behavior and multiscale dynamics, ultimately leading to chaos as the gain is increased. A complete bifurcation analysis is performed and successfully compared to experimental measurements. We expect this class of systems to emulate novel functionalities for analog signal processing based on time-delayed optoelectronic oscillators.