Study of period doubling in amplifying III-V structures

The nearly-degenerate four-wave mixing technique is used in semiconductor lasers in order to demonstrate the essential role played by mixing processes in the period doubling route towardstowards chaos. Using the two-level equivalence for the intracavity gain of semiconductor lasers, lasers, resonant four-wave mixing interactions are predicted. Interferences between these mixing processes are shown to be responsible for the dispersive like behavior of the conjugate intensity experimentally observed at half the relaxation oscillation frequency when the pump-probe detuning is varied. The same interferences provide the extra-gain which makes the route towards chaos much more probable via period doubling processes.