Topological signature of deterministic chaos in short nonstationary signals from an optical parametric oscillator

Although deterministic chaos has been predicted to occur in the triply resonant optical parametric oscillator (TROPO) 15 years ago, experimental evidence of chaotic behavior in this system has been lacking so far, in marked contrast with most nonlinear systems, where chaos has been actively tracked and found. This situation is probably linked to the high sensitivity of the TROPO to perturbations, which adversely affects stationary operation at high power. We report the experimental observation in this system of a burst of irregular behavior of duration 80 mus. Although the system is highly nonstationary over this time interval, a topological analysis allows us to extract a clear-cut signature of deterministic chaos from a time series segment of only nine base cycles (3 mus). This result suggests that nonstationarity is not necessarily an obstacle to the characterization of chaos.