Demonstration of acousto-optic bistability and chaos by direct nonlinear circuit modeling

A novel technique involving nonlinear dependent sources expressed as convergent power series expansions of one or more variables representing the output fields of a Bragg-domain hybrid acousto-optic device with feedback is presented. Using some straightforward modifications of a basic circuit prototype, we show how optical bistability, possible multistability, and chaos may be generated for three fundamental types of tuning effects, i.e., feedback gain, bias voltage, and input amplitude. The results obtained are shown to compare favorably with the existing theory and experiments.